The Face on the Back of the Moon - Stealth_Noodle (2024)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Leaving no breathing room in a schedule meant that one delay rippled catastrophically through the rest of the day.

Technical problems during an early morning interview meant being late to school, being late to school meant staying late to apologize to teachers who believed that high school students had no business prioritizing a TV station over the classroom, staying late at school meant arriving late at the office, arriving late at the office put Sae in one of her moods, and Sae's moods had the gravitational pull of a collapsing star. Which meant that Akechi was presented with a container of instant yakisoba at 8:00pm after his stomach growled loudly enough to startle her, and without the excuse of needing to leave to get dinner, he found himself stuck as her sounding board for another full hour.

There wasn't nearly enough time left to go home, eat a proper meal, do his homework, push back on the untenable media schedule proposed by his new agent (who seemed to be under orders to get his face plastered all over Tokyo before the end of the month, as if Akechi's budding fame would wither unless it bloomed before his eighteenth birthday), and take out a target in Mementos.

Akechi could charm his way out of serious academic consequences and obliquely intimidate the agent. He could neither charm nor intimidate Shido, so instead of going home, he went to Shibuya Station.

He was already tired enough to feel lightheaded as he crossed the threshold of the Metaverse. Tonight's job looked fairly low-effort, at least: the mental shutdown of one Takehiko Kushiki, whose name didn't ring any bells. Putting a few bullets in the Shadow of someone who had nothing to do with Shido's conspiracy required far less energy than unleashing Loki's Call of Chaos or taking down the Shadow of someone who knew enough to keep their guard up; the hardest part used to be falling asleep afterward, but he had stopped seeing glowing gazes on the backs of his eyelids months ago.

Focus. Now was not the time to think about sleep.

On his own, Akechi couldn't sense a target's Shadow from more than a floor or two away. He tried anyway, to no avail. His only option was to get moving while he still could and hope that he didn't have to delve too deep.

He hadn't even made it to Aiyatsbus before it all went to shit.

The high-pitched panic of weak Shadows behind him heralded the end of his precious alone time. There was a whooshing sound overhead followed by the thump of a landing, and then a horribly familiar white creature hopping toward him on stumpy black legs.

Cockatoos, Akechi had learned over the last two years, had bizarre anatomy that became exponentially more bizarre when enlarged and given anthropomorphic proportions. It was difficult to say what aspect was most off-putting—the eerily bright blue skin around the beady eyes, the way the feathers at the tips of the massive wings flexed like fingers, or the alien crab claw of a black beak, which opened in tandem with the flaring of the yellow crest to squawk, "You're supposed to be getting ready for bed!"

Akechi reached up under his mask to pinch the bridge of his nose, as if that could do anything for his headache. "Can we not do this right now? I have a deadline to meet."

"You can kill whoever it is tomorrow before school."

"Takehiko Kushiki," Akechi said, in hopes of triggering a navigation instinct.

"He's all the way down on the Path of Kaitul! Don't even think about it."

Akechi didn't need to think about it. He sprinted for the stairs, only to be brought up short by a freakish bird-man the size of a human toddler spitting in the face of aerodynamics to fly at him. Even though he had his mask on, Akechi instinctively protected his face and caught the flurry of talons with his forearms.

One of them sliced deep enough to draw blood. Akechi hissed and flailed. "Fuck off, Morgause!"

As expected, this elicited an ear-splitting screech. It also resulted in Morgause's talons abandoning their assault in favor of wrapping around his right arm like an extra pair of belts. One of her wings cuffed the side of his head.

"Rude," she scolded, as if Akechi's rudeness were novel or corrigible. She pecked at the horns on Akechi's mask until she seemed satisfied that she had made her point. "Stop being a brat and go home. Do you really think you're going to get anywhere with me fighting you every step of the way?"

Not in Akechi's experience, no. A year ago, he had stubbornly made the short descent into Qimranut with Morgause hounding him, and while he had eventually reached his target, the Shadow had taken one look at him and the cartoonish Fury shredding his suit before bursting into laughter. What should have been a straightforward application of Call of Chaos became a protracted comedy of errors that left him spitting feathers out of his mouth all the way back to the entrance.

It was a lost cause, but Akechi still fought for it: "If I kill him now, I can sleep in tomorrow. I would get the same amount of sleep and I wouldn't waste time traveling back and forth again."

"You should have thought about before you decided not to head straight home. It's bedtime."

When Morgause first appeared, Akechi had been fifteen years old and choking on his first taste of the Metaverse, alone and confused and exhausted, trembling in the afterbirth of the incomprehensible power that had just torn its way out of him. He still would have tried harder to reject aid if he had known that the creature offering it was such a petty tyrant.

Akechi sighed heavily as he turned back toward the exit. "This is fucking ridiculous."

"You don't have anything if you don't have your health," Morgause replied, smugly chipper. She knocked her beak against Akechi's helmet one last time before releasing Akechi's arm and alighting on the ground to follow Akechi like a waddling little warden.

A fresh wave of exhaustion accompanied Akechi's transition back to the real world. Bright-eyed prodigies couldn't be seen slouching in public, so he kept his head up and forced a pleasantly neutral expression as he made his way to the Yamanote Line. Morgause had already made herself scarce, but Akechi had no doubt that attempting to go anywhere but home would summon her wrath.

When he dutifully emerged from Kichijoji Station after transferring at Shinjuku, a white cockatoo swooped down from the roof, perched on his shoulder, and squawked, "Justice!" in a lightly crackling mimicry of Akechi's media-friendly voice. Akechi tightened his grip on his briefcase and fantasized vividly about wringing Morgause's neck.

At least it was late enough that no one tried to strike up a conversation with him about it on the walk to his apartment. The bird was usually a magnet for people who wanted to make their vapid observations Akechi's problem.

Being a charismatic teen detective was a gimmick. Being a charismatic teen detective with an exotic bird as a sidekick was a farce, but all he could do about the situation was attempt to imbue it with some dignity. Akechi had tried killing Morgause several times over the course of their relationship, both in and out of the Metaverse, only for the damned bird to come back the next day even louder and bossier. Twenty-four hours of peace were never worth the hell that followed.

It remained a mystery what Morgause got out of ensuring that Akechi ate vegetables, slept for eight hours a night, and didn't dilute his supernatural power by forming unnecessary relationships, but Akechi could throw her much, much farther than he would ever dream of trusting her.

"Justice!" Morgause squawked again as Akechi unlocked the door to the lobby of his apartment building. Mimicry again, not speech, perhaps for the benefit of the security cameras. With a final obnoxious shriek, she flew up toward the ninth floor, where she would let herself in through the window that Akechi didn't even bother trying to lock anymore. The "no pets" policy didn't apply to her, she insisted, because if anyone was the pet in this relationship, it was Akechi.

Having the elevator car to himself was the longest stretch of solitude Akechi had experienced all day. He rode it back down to the lobby and up to his floor twice more before finally, resentfully, trudging home.

Takehiko Kushiki's Shadow didn't put up a fight. It didn't even regard Akechi as a threat until he had already pulled the trigger, sending a bullet burrowing through the furrows of its brow. Snoops and blackmailers were savvy enough to expect the worst, so Akechi assumed that this was another paranoid hit—some witness who overheard without understanding, or just some poor bastard unaware that he was a DNA test away from blowing up a political career.

Unless it led to something as spectacular as another train derailment, his mental shutdown probably wouldn't even make the news. As far as Akechi was concerned, Kushiki's legacy would be making Akechi miss out on his much-needed morning bike ride.

Checking his voicemail over lunch reminded him that he had been in too much of a rush to call in the hit, so he spent the time that should have gone toward reeling in his agent instead placating Shido from the scant privacy offered by a stairwell.

Any hope of eating lunch burned away in the friction of switching between cheerfully greeting passers-by with drivel like, "Just a bit of urgent detective business, hahaha," and coming up with increasingly strained euphemisms to assure Shido that Kushiki's mental shutdown was imminent. Shido hated delays, but he usually wasn't this aggressively up Akechi's ass about one; maybe this had been one of his personal targets. Maybe it would have been worth fighting Morgause all the way down to Kaitul.

Shido ended the call with a gruff, "Don't prioritize it over your more time-sensitive tasks, but I want the names of the perpetrators of the Kamoshida incident sooner rather than later. I won't allow some bumbling upstarts to undermine my control of the Metaverse."

"Of course, sir," Akechi replied, fantasizing about dropping Shido into the depths of Mementos and watching him try to exert control over the Shadows that caught his scent. But it wouldn't be far enough of a fall yet. Even if he cried and begged and threw himself at Akechi's feet, it wouldn't be cracked into his bones that his accomplishments were not his own, that every breath he drew was at Akechi's discretion. He had probably found some trick in all that stolen research to defend against being pulled into the Metaverse against his will, anyway.

Akechi checked the time on his phone. No Detective Prince would scarf down food in a stairwell like a starving raccoon, so he ignored the pang in his stomach and returned to the classroom just in time to beat the bell. He could grab something from a convenience store after school, he promised himself. There were plenty on the way to Shibuya Station.

Now that he was appearing on television, too much of his classmates' and teachers' attention defaulted to him to let him get away with doing homework and answering messages on his phone during class. And since there was no reception in the Metaverse, he had to handle his agent en route, keeping his tone polite but firm and biting back death threats as he waited in line at a 777 with an egg salad sandwich and an energy drink. As an afterthought to maintain his soft image, he grabbed a packaged cream puff from an end-cap display.

Morgause landed on his shoulder the moment he exited the store, because karma intended to punish him with a thousand cuts before it finally came for his head.

"Justice!" she squawked before pecking at the bag of food. It would have been so easy, if ultimately pointless, to shove her inside and beat her to death against a utility pole. It had been too long since Akechi felt her blood on his hands.

But his public image couldn't afford that hit, so he strolled along to Shibuya Station with the demeanor of someone whose stomach wasn't growling and whose imagination wasn't fixated on the crunch of delicate little bones.

He tore into his sad sandwich as soon as he had tucked himself into a shadowed alcove just inside the entrance to Mementos. It tasted like wet, eggy disappointment, which didn't matter; what mattered was that the carbs, fat, and protein would fuel his body for a few more hours. So much of the complex interplay of the corporeal and the cognitive remained a mystery, but he found that real food eaten in the Metaverse combatted real hunger.

A cluster of Morgause's disturbingly finger-like feathers fished the cream puff out of the bag. "This is for me, right?"

It sure as hell wasn't for Akechi. "Eat it if you want. Just keep quiet. This is a stakeout."

There was no guarantee that Akechi's quarry would be in Mementos today, but there was an outstanding request on that amateurish "Phantom Aficionado" website, and it didn't take an actual ace detective to connect the dots between the Kamoshida incident, the obvious suspects in the Shujin student body, the rumors about phantom thieves flying around Shujin Academy, and the forum where a few users already reported that their petty wishes had granted. Akechi would have full dossiers on Shido's desk before Shujin's useless principal had even found someone to delegate his investigation to.

Watching Morgause eat anything was unpleasant, doubly so when a cream filling was involved, so Akechi turned away to work on his homework. Mementos was a miserable place to do math problems; the dim red light made him squint, even after he took off his mask, and he had to detach his left gauntlet after destroying two pencils.

The clicking of Morgause's tongue startled him but gave him plenty of time to return his mask and claws to his outfit and his homework to his briefcase before he heard the chatter of approaching voices. Akechi would have expected self-proclaimed phantom thieves to slink in silence, but he could pick out the clomping of at least three pairs of feet on the stairs, and one of the voices in particular seemed to have its volume setting stuck at "holler."

Akechi waited for the parade to pass his alcove and reach the gates. With more caution than was probably necessary, he angled his head to peer around the corner without catching any of the light.

Their masks failed to obscure their most identifiable characteristics. There was the bleached-blond delinquent who had a violent history with Kamoshida, bickering with Kamoshida's sexual harassment victim whose friend had jumped off the school roof, and leading the way was the messy-haired transfer student whose criminal record Kamoshida had leaked. Only the elegant, elongated boy following them was not immediately recognizable. Perhaps the thieves had recruited someone smart enough to keep his head down in the real world.

What surprised him was the presence of a cartoonishly proportioned creature that looked like a color-inverted, mammalian version of Morgause. A cat, maybe? Even the utility belt around its hips looked like a black version of her yellow one. "Just one target today," it announced, in a voice that sounded like a less squawky version of Morgause's, and turned into a car.

Unlike the others, the gangly boy gasped in shock. He recovered quickly, arranging his fingers into a rectangular frame in front of his face, and said, "Marvelous! Could I ask you to transform again more slowly, so that I might capture the moment of transition?"

The car's protest about the impossibility of transforming slowly was drowned out by the blond boy's noisy impatience to get moving.

"Fox has a point, though," said the girl. "Like, if we slowed it down, could we watch Mona's insides turn into seats?"

The blond boy pulled a face. "Don't make me think about that right before I gotta sit on 'em."

"It's just cognition! There's no way it would be something gross like that!" The car's engine revved into a growl, only quieting when the transfer student patted the driver's side door before climbing inside.

In a tone that confirmed he was the leader, he leaned out the window and said, "C'mon, we've got a catnapper's heart to steal."

The rest of the team clambered aboard without further argument, and the car rumbled off down the tracks. A tail whipped back and forth from under the rear bumper.

Akechi hadn't been expecting much, but he still felt the sting of disappointment. These idiots had bumbled their way into the Metaverse and felt entitled to enact their wills upon it? Surely whatever god or demon granted Akechi such unfathomable power hadn't seen the same potential in them.

"It's weird that the cat turns into a car, right?" Morgause said. "How does that make any sense?"

Explaining the whimsical elements of beloved children's movies to an annoying bird with crumbs stuck to her beak was near the bottom of Akechi's list of priorities. "Never mind that. Why does it look like you?"

Affronted, she splayed a wing against her chest and flared her crest. "I don't look anything like a cat! Or a car!"

"Species is irrelevant when you're both black-and-white anthropomorphic animals that can transform in the Metaverse. Do you really expect me to believe that you have no relation to each other?"

Morgause hissed. "How would I know if we did? I don't remember anything from before I found you."

Akechi narrowed his eyes. "Conveniently."

"It's actually very inconvenient for me. You'd be a lot less frustrating to take care of if I had anyone more frustrating to compare you to."

This argument never went anywhere productive, so Akechi bit his tongue as he recoiled from take care of and cracked open the energy drink. Just as real food in the Metaverse had an effect on both corporeal hunger and cognitive wounds, energy drinks made him feel less exhausted on both a physical and mental level. Well worth powering through the chalky aftertaste.

Chugging half the can got him back on track enough to say, "Did you recognize the tall one with the kitsune mask?"

"Never laid eyes on him." Morgause's surveillance capabilities had their limits, both in and out of the Metaverse. While her vision and hearing were superior to a human's, what constituted a safely discreet distance for a loose cockatoo in Minami-Aoyama undercut those advantages. "Want me to check the rest of the classrooms on Monday?"

"There's no guarantee that he's a Shujin student. Wait for them to leave Mementos and trail him."

Morgause cocked her head, beady black eye locked like a bullet in a chamber. "And what are your plans for the rest of the day?"

"Catching up." Akechi drained the rest of the energy drink and tucked the can back into the bag with the wrappers for the sandwich and the cream puff. Littering in Mementos probably wouldn't have any consequences on its own, but the last thing he needed was to tip off his quarry with a carelessly discarded piece of trash.

As he headed up the steps, Morgause called after him, "Eat a real dinner!"

Akechi flipped her off without turning around.

Back in the real world, Akechi's phone vibrated through a backlog of message from his agent, the most alarming of which asked how Akechi would rate his own singing abilities. Another string of messages from Sae chronicled her growing exasperation with combing through poorly written police reports, with increasingly unsubtle hints that she expected Akechi's assistance. There was also voicemail from Shido, which made Akechi tense up despite their agreement that same-day hits had to be called in before noon.

The inbox connected to his food blog was overflowing. It appeared he had neglected to turn off comment notifications on a recent post, a particularly unfortunate oversight on a review of soft serve where one of his selfies happened to, as a mortifying preview put it, "show tongue."

His body ached to march back down into Mementos and carve through faceless swarms of Shadows, pushing deeper and deeper until he found something strong enough to put up a real fight. How would the Phantom Thieves react if they found a section of the tracks cracked and gouged, spattered with blood that even they would realize couldn't have come from a Shadow?

Instead he played the message from Shido and was ordered to cause a scandalous breakdown at a Wild-Duck Burger location on June 1. Another of Okumura's, obviously, not only because of the target but because it was fucking typical of Okumura not to provide a name. "Any on-site employee will do," as if he were doing Akechi a favor instead of giving him extra work.

As Akechi silently seethed, another message came in from his agent, informing him that he had landed a coveted interview with Teen Vague tomorrow and needed to be in hair and makeup at the coveted time of 6:30am.

He spent the next two hours at a café table, plowing through his homework, crafting a report on the most recent rampage case he "solved" to make sure his "deductions" didn't make him sound suspicious or psychic, and taking polite bites from a slab of sugar and food coloring masquerading as cake. After his fifth unsuccessful attempt to take a selfie where he didn't look dead inside, he gave up and just posted shots of the most cloying dessert he had inflicted on himself to date. "Refreshing cuteness," "charming decorations," whatever, his reviews were drivel by design. Anything to push that glimpse of tongue off the front page.

Morgause caught up with him on his way to join Sae for an evening of frustration, eyestrain, and highlighter fumes. In a voice that would have registered as simple squawking to anyone else, she reported, "The others called him Yusuke when they got back to the real world."

As expected, the moniker of "Fox" had more to do with his mask than his real-world identity. Akechi idly wondered if they all used childish codenames. "Is that all you found out?"

"Of course not. I trailed him until he went into a big weird shack in Shibuya and didn't come back out. That must be where he lives."

Weird shack rang a bell, but not an immediately identifiable one, and not one that resonated with any known facts about the other suspects. As soon as Akechi got a moment to catch his breath and sort through his thoughts, he had no doubt that he would make the connection.

His trail of thought derailed when Morgause's beak butted against the side of his mouth. Over his sputtering, she said, "Aha! Cake breath. You didn't eat a real dinner, did you?"

Akechi opened his mouth, then clenched it shut. No Detective Prince would scream at a bird on a busy street. After counting up to ten and back down to zero, he replied under his breath, "I'll eat dinner later."

Talons dug into his shoulder until he stopped and reluctantly turned in the direction toward which Morgause was bobbing her head. Just across the street was a fast casual restaurant with enormous, elaborate salads on display in the window.

"Wherever you're going," she decreed, "you can get there after you eat. When's the last time you had a vegetable, kid?"

The rehydrated scraps in yesterday's instant yakisoba probably didn't count. When Akechi couldn't recall the last time he had eaten something that would pass as a balanced meal, he took out his phone and did thirty seconds of research on Greener Green's corporate ownership to make sure he wouldn't risk ordering his own karmic retribution.

Having run out of excuses, he crossed the street to subject himself to salad. Morgause didn't abandon her shoulder perch until Akechi opened the door and was on the verge of being asked to leave her outside.

As he settled in resentfully at the counter with a heap of vegetables and grilled chicken, his phone buzzed again. Okumura had thought of another rival fast food chain where any employee would do.

The last birthday that Akechi celebrated was his seventh, when his mother gifted him the toy ray gun that he had spent months begging for. Overjoyed, he tied the sleeves of a shirt around his neck as a cape and ran around their tiny apartment shooting invisible villains, shouting, "Don't worry, Mama! I'll protect you!" until it was time to get ready for bed. On nights when his mother's face was hard and weary, he took the gun with him to the bathhouse. He even slept with it under his pillow in case he had a nightmare, because he could hold it and feel brave without waking her up and making her face harder and wearier.

On his eighth birthday, his mother didn't get out of bed. She didn't respond when he tried to talk to her, only snapped at him when he tried to turn on the lights or open the curtains, and she broke into sobs that shook her entire body when he brought her a cup of instant soup. He spent most of that day clutching his gun to his chest in the dark and pretending that he was too brave to cry.

He understood now how much she must have gone without to afford such an expensive toy. His others were all secondhand or poorly made knockoffs, like her fancy shoes that she kept gluing back together. In her position, he would have resented the child who trapped him in a tar pit of poverty, but her bitterness came out only on her bad days, when she snarled at him that she wished she had never met his father. On her good days, she smiled as she listened to him ramble about Featherman and Star Battles and everything he learned at school, and told him that he was the only good thing in her life.

On his ninth birthday, there wasn't anyone to celebrate with, nor anything left worth celebrating.

So he wasn't at Jazz Jin tonight out of any desire to commemorate the date. He just found himself too burnt out to work or study, and Jazz Jin was the only place he could be without the risk of unwanted social interactions—including with Morgause, who wasn't allowed inside. No one cared if he sat alone at his usual table, closed his eyes, and lost himself in the music. There was no live band tonight, but Muhen's taste in recordings remained impeccable.

The horns rose and fell, buoyed by the double bass. The piano wove between them and egged on the drums. His breaths drew in the smell of wood polish and stale tobacco, blending with the lingering sour-sweet aftertaste of his drink.

He still couldn't flood his senses thoroughly enough to stop his brain from dredging up the assorted indignities of the past few days. The Teen Vague interview had turned out to be a short survey followed by a long photoshoot, during which overpriced suits were pinned snug against his body and by the end of which he wanted to claw the face off the next person who told him to find his light, cheat for the camera, or fucking smize.

A smudge on his history notes resulted in his staying after school to rework an essay about Minamoto no Yoritomo into one that focused on Minamoto no Yoshitomo. The persistent belief that "consultant" was a fancy word for "intern" meant that Akechi spent more of his last visit to the police station fetching coffee than working on cases. Sae at least treated him like a colleague, but she relentlessly grilled him about anything he had to attribute to detective's intuition, and she had no compunctions about making him work late on a school night.

His breaking point was yesterday's Okumura job. With a list of Wuck employees at the assigned location in hand, he headed into Mementos and chose his target by asking Morgause which one's Shadow was closest. Given his prior experiences with fast food employees, Akechi expected the berserked Shadow to cackle about spitting in the food, throwing chairs at customers, or burning down the restaurant.

Instead the Shadow ripped off its clothing, raised its arms dramatically, and cried, "I can't keep denying the world this majesty!" while thrusting its hips. As Morgause unhelpfully pointed out, its majesty looked an awful lot like an oversized soggy Wuck fry.

Akechi aggressively sucked the rest of his mocktail up through his straw to snap himself out of it. He came here for a respite from school, celebrity, birds, and work, both the bullshit consulting gig that paid him in experience and the much more demanding job that compensated him with an apartment and a credit card. Like everything from Shido, those were riddled with strings; the apartment was undoubtedly surveilled, and someone on Shido's payroll was just as undoubtedly combing through the card's charges and flagging anything of interest. The Shadows wandering Mementos inexplicably left cash behind when they dissolved into smoke, so Akechi at least had enough pocket money to avoid putting Jazz Jin on Shido's radar.

The piano danced concentric circles around the guitar. Akechi's thoughts spiraled ahead of it.

No. Enough. He opened his eyes and stared at the stage, but the disconnect between the sight of the unplayed piano there and the sound of the unseen piano in the recording only made it harder for him to ground himself. He rested his face against the table and breathed, counting down between inhales and exhales. Wood polish. Third-hand smoke. The sticky-sweet-acrid hint of a spilled drink. Sourness on his tongue. Piano. Drums. Bass. Breath.

Time drained away between the cracks of syncopation, then gushed back to the surface when Akechi's phone vibrated a discreet alarm in his pocket. Time to leave, if he didn't want to be dive-bombed for flouting his Morgause-imposed curfew. It was just as well. Tonight didn't feel like a night when he would fully relax even if he lingered until Muhen shooed him out to catch the last train.

Muhen was wiping down the counter when Akechi returned his empty glass. They exchanged their usual pleasantries before Muhen took the unprecedented step of adding, "Happy Birthday, Akechi-kun."

Akechi froze. Was that godforsaken Teen Vague interview already out, publicizing his birthdate and blood type along with the preferences of his anodyne public persona? Or had Muhen gone digging for information about the wretched, unwanted thing hidden behind it? The thought of being reconsidered through either lens made Akechi want to shatter his glass against the bar and swallow the shards.

His alarm must have shown on his face, because Muhen added, "You showed me your school ID the first time you came in here. I never forget a regular's info."

Holding back a little sigh of relief, Akechi put on one of the plastic smiles he usually left at the top of the stairwell. "I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Muhen-san, but I prefer not to make a fuss about it."

"Hey, I get it." Muhen tipped his hat and smiled. "Happy Thursday."

Heat pricked absurdly at Akechi's eyes. Not trusting himself to reply, he let his smile slip into something a little more sincere, nodded, and headed up to the street.

The bright side of being dive-bombed by a dictatorial cockatoo was that his yelp of surprise broke up the lump in his throat.

A last-minute event cancellation appeared in Akechi's notifications while he was in the middle of the Shibuya Scramble Crossing, at once an insult and a relief. If they had cancelled a few hours earlier, he could have gone for his morning bike ride at a reasonable time instead of the ass-crack of dawn. Still, a free Sunday afternoon was a free Sunday afternoon.

He made a sharp turn into the shadow of a building, where the steady flow of foot traffic would obscure him from people-watchers. Morgause's talons dug little holes into his cashmere sweater vest in response to the sudden change in direction, but even that couldn't ruin his abruptly improved mood. Akechi was about to get back on top of his life.

"You're gonna be late if you dawdle here," Morgause said. Akechi flashed the cancellation notice in her nosy face before opening the Meta-Nav.

He had been one surname away from presenting Shido with a complete list of Phantom Thieves for long enough. Following a dormant hunch, he scrolled through the search history until he hit upon the word "shack." Right, Ichiryusai Madarame's Palace. It had been a while since Akechi needed to rampage through that gaudy museum to menace something out of Madarame's Shadow. Presumably the Yusuke who had fallen in with the Shujin delinquents was one of his unlucky pupils, which would make Yusuke's full name trivially easy to uncover, and which furthermore suggested—

Suggestions obviated themselves when the massive outdoor screens were filled with the image of Madarame at a live press conference. Right before Akechi's eyes, one of Shido's most reliable revenue streams broke down in the same way that Kamoshida was reported to have done.

Morgause let out a low whistle directly into Akechi's ear. "Shido's probably popping a few blood vessels right now."

Call of Chaos broke every chain tethering a target's heart—fear, shame, guilt, devotion, all of it shattered to release whatever desire was most desperately denied. The old man sobbing on the screen appeared to be experiencing something like the inverse—a heart chained so heavily that every desire within it had been crushed, save the desire to be punished.

But hearts put themselves back in order after Call of Chaos, locking up their wayward desires and hooking back into a society that condemned them for acts they couldn't remember committing. Would the victim of a change of heart ever regain a sense of self, or was this living death as irreversible as a mental shutdown? Did the perpetrators themselves know, or were they just a pack of self-righteous fools meddling with forces beyond their comprehension?

In a fit of paranoia, Akechi opened the Meta-Nav again and whispered his own name into it.

The reassuring error message was obscured by Morgause's tutting beak. "I told you, didn't I? A Persona's just a Shadow you've accepted as part of you. Once that happens, it can't go wandering around Mementos or building a Palace."

Every human heart cast a single Shadow, according to Morgause, and Akechi was inclined to believe that, because how else could mental shutdowns work the way that they demonstrably did? Except Akechi's Shadow must have snapped in half, because he just as demonstrably had two Personas. Or maybe his heart itself was malformed, in which case some mangled little piece of it might still be exposed to those who would twist it to their own ends.

In the face of his skeptical silence, Morgause added, "Look, I'd sense it if you had a spare Shadow somewhere. Trust me."

"Never," Akechi replied without hesitation. She hissed and bit his ear.

Akechi's phone began vibrating as he applied pressure and tried to keep blood from dripping on his clothes. Without checking the caller ID, he held his phone to his uninjured ear and answered it with an upbeat, "The good news is that I know exactly who they are."

"Who who are?" said a voice that sounded nothing like Shido and a lot like the garrulous assistant producer of Good Morning Japan.

Akechi coughed, buying a moment to smooth over his fluster. "My apologies, I was expecting a call from a senior detective regarding one of my cases. I'm not at liberty to share the details."

"Then I hope it's not a case related to those Phantom Thieves rumors, because that's what we want you to talk about on Friday!" An annoying, repetitive noise underscored the assistant producer's words. Having endured her in person several times, Akechi assumed that she was compulsively clicking her pen. "Are you watching that artist's press conference right now? It's trending like you wouldn't believe. Any chance we could get you on set tomorrow instead?"

Being a model student was crucial to Akechi's image, though it wasn't as if his education would ultimately matter; at the rate Shido was accelerating the destabilization of the government, Akechi doubted he would even finish high school. He weeded the bitterness out of his tone before replying, "I'm afraid I've already coordinated with my teachers around the original schedule."

The assistant producer clicked her tongue out of sync with her pen. "Then be prepared to pivot if something even bigger happens by then. It's hard to believe that huge subway accident was just a few weeks ago, isn't it? Hardly anyone's talking about it after that that Shujin Academy scandal broke. Or remember that naked burger selfie guy the other day? Which restaurant was that at, again?"

"Big Bang Burger, perhaps?" Akechi replied, and did not tap the wing that Morgause raised for a high-five. "There do seem to have been a lot of high-profile incidents lately. It requires discipline in times like these not to draw conclusions from insufficient evidence."

"Oh, don't worry, Akechi-kun, we know not to expect wild speculation from you. Audiences looking for that tune in to Inexpert Opinions every weeknight at 8:00pm to hear their favorite comedians react to the headlines!"

Presumably no one was looking for that, if she felt the need to shoehorn in an advertisement for it. "Well then, I'll see you Thursday afternoon for the briefing."

"One more thing." The clicking stopped, which indicated that the assistant producer was finally getting around to the purpose of the call. "Eagle-eyed fans have spotted you around town with a big white bird on your shoulder, and everyone's just dying to learn more about it. Bring it with you to the taping, won't you? A handsome young man with a cute animal is ratings gold!"

Fucking Morgause. Akechi made a series of noncommittal noises as he wracked his brain for an excuse, but Good Morning Japan semi-regularly invited exotic animals and their handlers to the set, so it would be difficult to make the case that a cockatoo presented a greater risk than a tiger cub or a python. The best he could come up with was, "Ah, but I wouldn't want to distract from the interview. A pet bird isn't terribly relevant to sudden changes in human behavior."

"I'm sure you wouldn't let that happen. It's a detective's job to make connections, after all." The assistant producer snapped her fingers before resuming her infernal clicking. "I bet that bird helps you solve cases, doesn't it? Don't answer that—save the details for the live audience!"

Morgause preened. "Hear that? She can already tell I'm the brains of this operation." Akechi raised an arm to swat her but stopped when her talons pricked through to his skin.

The assistant producer laughed. "It's with you right now, isn't it? I just heard it sing."

Feeling more headache than human, Akechi ignored the question. "And Yoshizawa-san is on board with this?"

"It was all Yoshizawa-san's idea. I just told him about your bird and reminded him of how much he enjoyed having those Silkie chickens visit the set."

There was nothing to be done about it now but to incorporate it into the narrative. Squeezing the bridge of his nose until the pain was sharp enough to help him focus, Akechi said, "I can't give away too much, of course."

"Of course!"

In a last-ditch attempt to salvage his dignity, Akechi feigned concern that the bird might react poorly to the lights and sounds of the studio, which resulted in his having to agree to bring Morgause to the briefing as a test. By the time he extricated himself from the conversation, his notifications informed him that he had missed three calls from Shido and had a fourth coming in.

"The good news is that I know exactly who they are" probably would have played better three missed calls ago. Akechi muted himself and angled the phone away from his ear.

Morgause hooked one foot tighter into Akechi's vest and brought the other up to squeeze the phone's volume-down button until Shido's vitriol was drowned out by ambient street noises. "I'll let you know when he's done ranting," she said. "In return, I'd tell you to make sure they get my good side, but I look great from any angle." She bobbed her head back and forth to demonstrate.

Scowling, Akechi wrested his phone free and turned the volume back up. "I'm more than capable of putting up with another one of his tantrums," he said, just before noticing that he had unmuted himself. In the ominous silence that followed, he hastened to add, "Sorry, the bird's acting up again. You were saying, sir?"

He felt his precious free time slipping away as Shido berated him in his uninjured ear and Morgause smugly scolded him in the bleeding one.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

Bringing a cockatoo into a building where cockatoos did not belong went about as well as Akechi expected it would. People barreling with single-minded focus to their destinations didn't acknowledge the situation; people with nothing better to do than hang around in the lobby unabashedly gawked; a few people took one look at Morgause and retreated to whatever bird-free zone they had come from; fewer still gazed longingly at her, fingers twitching with the desire to pet. The receptionist on duty appeared to be in the last category. The nearby security guard looked on inscrutably.

Akechi approached the desk and launched into his rehearsed explanation: "Good afternoon. I trust Yoshizawa-san informed you that I would be bringing this bird on set today, as well as for filming tomorrow. I'm unfamiliar with the policies regarding animal guests, but of course I'll be happy to abide by whatever rules are in place."

The receptionist nodded absently and said, "What's your name, cutie?" Before Akechi could decide whether to take more offense at the pet name or the forgetfulness, Morgause hopped down his arm to accept hesitant, then enthusiastic caresses.

Morgause clicked her beak, winked, and squawked, "Justice!"

The guard chuckled. "Figures. You're a well-behaved little fella, aren't you, Justice?"

This particular guard had previously limited his interactions with Akechi to cursory glances at the sign-in sheet and silent nods toward the interior door. Until now, he had been Akechi's favorite guard.

"I wouldn't mind putting him on a leash," Akechi said hopefully.

"Doesn't seem necessary to me."

To Akechi's rising pique, the receptionist wrote "VISITOR PASS 2016/06/09 - JUSTICE" on a little strip of paper and tied it loosely around Morgause's ankle. She beamed at Morgause's parting head bobs and called after them, "I can't wait to watch the show tomorrow!"

As soon as the door closed behind them, Akechi said under his breath, "'Justice,' really?"

Morgause nodded, smugly fluffing up the feathers around her head. "It's practical. Do you want people to ask questions about my name, or do you want them to think, 'Oh, of course'?" When Akechi didn't reply, she clicked her tongue. "That's what I thought. Jealous of my perfect stage name?"

This was a dirty jab below the belt. Two years ago, Akechi had been wracked with anxiety over whether Shido would be more likely to recall the name of a woman he summarily discarded or to run a thorough background check on any pseudonym Akechi invented. He bet on the latter, rolled the dice, and won; in their second meeting, Shido made pointed references to the group home where Akechi was living, the junior high he was about to graduate from, and his entrance exam scores, wryly congratulating him on his ambition in taking exams for schools he couldn't afford on an orphan's budget.

Morgause no doubt remembered every name that Akechi had considered, most of which, in retrospect, were more suited to a Shounen Fly protagonist than a real person. He braced for a recitation of the most embarrassing ones, but instead she moved on to, "By the way, why 'him'? You're the one who pointed out I have a girl's name."

Relief softened Akechi's shoulders. "A stage gender is also practical. Or were you hoping to see promotional images of yourself with long eyelashes and feathery cleavage?"

Instead of the expected grumbling about the hopeless state of society, Morgause stayed silent, crest flat and head cocked. Akechi stilled himself and could just make out snatches of a rowdy conversation from just around the corner where the hallway branched.

He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and stalked forward as quietly as he could, though he doubted his footsteps would register over the volume of complaints about performing manual labor. Closer, and the voices become unmistakably familiar. Closer still, and "phantom thieves" rang in his ears. His right ear rang again as Morgause's wing eagerly swatted it.

The blond boy seemed to be every bit as loud outside the Metaverse as he was inside it. Surely all of Shujin knew who the Phantom Thieves were by now—except, Akechi gathered, the useless principal. What that man did to earn his keep as one of Shido's supporters remained a mystery that Akechi had no particular investment in solving.

He lingered just around the corner, following their inane conversation from blowing their own cover to discussing the logistics of sneaking a cat into an amusement park. When it became clear they wouldn't be circling back to their Metaverse activities, he decided to make his move.

But he had scarcely taken a step before Morgause said into his ear, "Do you have an opener, or are you just going to blurt out the first socially awkward thing that pops into your head?"

"I'm not socially awkward," Akechi whispered sharply. "I'm an up-and-coming celebrity."

"When's the last time you had a successful conversation with someone your age?"

Successful was an unfair modifier that shot down every answer on the tip of Akechi's tongue and left him with, "I fended off Morioka's confession earlier this week without making her cry."

Morgause clucked her tongue. "You're hopeless. What you need is a Cyrano de Birdgerac. Get it? Eh?"

Akechi applied a level of force to his grip on his briefcase that he would rather have applied to her neck. "I won't hesitate to crush you with my bare hands and leave your corpse in a convenience store bin."

"Oh no, how ever would I deal with the temporary inconvenience?" Morgause's talons bored deliberate little holes through his jacket and shirt. "This is for your own good."

Without waiting for a response, she launched herself off his shoulder and around the corner, eliciting an uproar. Akechi pressed his hand to his face, took a few deep breaths, and followed.

The Shujin delinquents were clustered in the middle of the corridor with Morgause circling above them, the girl exclaiming in delight, the blond holding his arms up defensively, and the leader fighting a losing battle to stop a black cat from climbing on top of his head.

Takamaki, Sakamoto, and Amamiya, Akechi's memory supplied. In Mementos, they had called their cat-cum-car something, as well. Mono? It didn't matter. No one would be issuing an arrest warrant for a cat.

"Please pardon my bird," he called over the cacophony, bright and polite, hands raised in self-deprecating apology. The cat dived into Amamiya's bag. "I'm afraid he's not very well behaved, but he's harmless. I hope he hasn't frightened you."

Sakamoto shot him a look from between his forearms. "Dude, why the hell do you have a bird in here?"

Akechi whistled and shrugged his right shoulder. Morgause took the hint and landed on it with an unnecessarily dramatic flare of her wings. "We'll be filming together for the first time tomorrow, so I wanted to make sure that he can behave himself on set. I wasn't expecting to have to worry about the hallways, haha."

His disarming little laugh seemed to annoy Sakamoto further, but Takamaki chimed in before he could say anything: "Oh, are you a celebrity?"

Akechi feigned being flattered. "I wouldn't say so. I've only appeared on television a few times, after all. Ah, but where are my manners? I'm Goro Akechi."

Amamiya's eyebrows drew subtly together. "Hey, we've heard that name before, right?" said a high-pitched voice that Akechi hadn't expected to hear in the real world.

Akechi flicked his gaze sideways to Morgause, trying to beam it into her little bird brain that if they could understand the cat's speech outside the Metaverse, then she had better err on the side of assuming they could understand her speech, too. When he looked back at the group, Akechi caught Amamiya's eyes narrowing behind his glasses. Observant, that one. Potentially problematically so.

"I'm Ann Takamaki!" drew Akechi's attention back to someone who seemed much less observant. "I've done a little modeling, but I'm not a celebrity, either."

Sakamoto side-eyed her. "Uh, not being a celebrity's kinda the default..."

"Hurry up and introduce yourselves!" the cat hissed. "It's way more suspicious not to!"

"Ren Amamiya," the leader said obligingly, raising several questions about the group's power dynamics.

"Ryuji Sakamoto. Your bird got a name?"

"Justice!" Morgause squawked, raising her crest.

Akechi forced the creeping stiffness out of his smile. "Ah, he's decided to introduce himself. It's common for so-called 'talking birds' to take a shine to mimicking particular words and phrases, and in his case, he's especially fond of the sound of his own name."

Morgause tilted her head, whistled, and tugged a lock of Akechi's hair with her beak, just to be an asshole.

"Where'd you get him?" Amamiya asked, a little too pointed to come off as casual.

"That's a long story, I'm afraid, and I have to hurry to a meeting now." Pretending to notice their uniforms for the first time, Akechi added, "Oh, you're all from Shujin Academy, aren't you? We'll be filming together tomorrow. Perhaps we'll have a chance to talk a bit more afterwards."

With a cheerful little wave, he excused himself and continued down the hall.

"Very smooth," Morgause deadpanned.

Akechi shushed her and said under his breath, "Didn't you hear the cat talk? Don't assume they can't understand you, too."

"We saw the cat talk in the Metaverse. They've never seen me there at all. I'd say as long as their cognition of me is of a regular bird, they can't understand squat."

"I'd say you're overestimating your knowledge of cognitive psience as well as your stealthiness," Akechi said, slowing to a halt in front of the studio door as he smoothed his hair and shirt. "Don't embarrass me."

Morgause waited for the door to open and Akechi's pleasant mask to slot into place before chirping, "Don't worry, I'll leave that up to you."

What should have been a twenty-minute briefing lasted a full excruciating hour.

"How many words does he know, Akechi-kun?" asked the female host—Tachibana? Akechi had too many names swirling around his head lately, and he dreaded slipping up and dropping the name of someone who subsequently made headlines for turning up in a vegetative state or ramming a stolen yacht into a bridge.

Better not to risk a guess. Akechi turned with a camera-ready smile and replied, "I'm not certain, to be honest. He seems to lose interest in most words and phrases after repeating them for a while. Other than his catchphrase, of course."

"Justice!" Morgause squawked, earning more scratches under her chin.

"Can you say 'Tachibana-san'?" the other host asked.

The woman who was indeed Tachibana laughed and wagged her finger at him. "No, no, we should teach him something like 'Welcome back to Good Morning Japan!' or 'Thank you to our sponsors!'"

"Those are both rather complex," Akechi began, so it should have come as no surprise that Morgause cut him off, in a voice that sounded like Tachibana's passed through a tin can and a taut wire: "Thank you!"

Tachibana clapped her hands in delight. "Yes! Thank you! What a clever bird!"

Morgause preened. "Thank you! Clever bird!"

The sooner they wrapped this up, the sooner Akechi could move on to sending the day's scheduled Mementos target on a rampage. A mental shutdown was scheduled to be triggered tomorrow evening, too, presumably just because Shido thought Akechi deserved two days in a row of combined media and Metaverse exhaustion.

With neither of the hosts paying the least bit of attention to him, Akechi glowered at Morgause and tried to silently communicate that the longer this dragged on, the more fights he would be picking on both trips to blow off steam, and the higher the odds of friendly fire.

Staring him dead in the eye, Morgause nuzzled against Tachibana's hand and whistled the jingle that played at the beginning of the show.

"Oh, he deserves a treat for that!" Tachibana dug a little packet out of her purse before asking, almost as an afterthought, "Is it all right to give him a sunflower seed, Akechi-kun? I read those are good treats for birds."

Akechi forced his teeth to stop grinding together. "Be my guest."

Over the horrible cracking noises, the male host said, "We'll have a little bowl on set for him tomorrow. That should help if the environment is stressful for him, right, Akechi-kun? Maybe we can even bribe him to do a few tricks for the camera."

This was going to be a deeply stupid interview, even by the standards of Good Morning Japan.

As a child, Akechi had assumed that whatever he saw on television represented the total time and effort put into it. The camera rolled for the length of a broadcast, and then everyone went home. Now he understood how television, like bonsai, transformed tremendous time and effort into a miniature simulacrum of something natural. The briefings, the plans, the negotiations, the waiting—all of it added up to a neat little segment of a talk show that the audience could believe was a spontaneous conversation.

And the most draining part was having to stay in character for all of it. Yesterday's target had been so deep in Mementos that his cognitive weariness still lingered, but at least he had headed off the problem of needing to go just as deep again later today.

Hair and makeup dragged on as the people who were supposed to ensure that Akechi looked flawless instead found excuses to fuss over Morgause and pester Akechi with questions about her: How long have you had him? How many words does he know? What's his favorite food? Can I give him a sunflower seed?

Nothing that Akechi hadn't scripted answers to the night before in preparation for the interview, but the repetition grated. He held out hope for Morgause to throw up the glut of sunflower seeds on camera and be banned from future tapings.

A moment's peace arrived when three production assistants arrived to pay tribute to Morgause and, to Akechi's relief, were too absorbed in their gossip to shift to bird-related topics.

"Did you hear? She signs in with her dead sister's name!"

"No way they'd let her do that. They check IDs."

"Bet she uses her dead sister's ID, too."

"That's so creepy!"

"Why would they make her sign in at all? She's the director's daughter."

"It's true, though! Shiki saw it!"

"Shiki still thinks she saw Hanako-san in third grade. Akechi-kun, can I give him a sunflower seed?"

So much for that, then. Akechi swallowed a groan and pitched his voice light and sweet: "Of course. Just one, though, please. We're watching his figure."

As intended, the conversation pivoted to diets, and Akechi relaxed slightly in his chair.

"I wish they'd stop spreading rumors about that poor family," said Akechi's hair stylist, low enough that he was barely audible over the intermittent bursts of hairspray. His brief reign as the Least Irritating Person in the Room ended when he added, "Wasn't there some old TV show where the detective had a cockatoo? Tch, I'll never remember the title. It was foreign, anyway."

"How interesting," Akechi forced himself to say. He was rescued from meandering speculation about why fictional detectives were usually paired with dogs when the assistant director finally, finally ordered everyone to wrap things up and get into position.

Morgause alighted on Akechi's shoulder as he stood on his mark just off-stage. "Next time I want some of that face powder," she said. "My cheek feathers are a little shiny."

Through teeth gritted into a smile, Akechi replied, "I will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that there isn't a next time." The countdown on set gave him an excuse to pinch her beak shut between his fingers.

The hosts introduced themselves at the top of the hour, confirming that their names were Tachibana and Amazaki. Most likely Akechi wouldn't need to address them during the segment, but he echoed their names over and over inside his head. No other popular talk show had so many big, easy strings for Shido's supporters to pull; Akechi would never hear the end of it if he fucked things up.

"Akechi-san to set!" the assistant director called immediately after the cut to commercial.

Akechi strode forward into a sea of bright lights and excited chattering, keeping his back straight and his expression pleasant. In his peripheral vision, he picked out the delinquent trio seated in the second row of the audience. Sakamoto's much too loud "Ain't that the guy from yesterday?" carried over the many overlapping variations on "That bird!"

The excitement hit a crescendo as Akechi sat down, which he was irked to realize came in response to Morgause fluffing up her crest and wings. Akechi tipped his head against Morgause's body, an admonishment that hopefully read to the audience as affection.

The murmuring quieted as the assistant director counted down. On "one," Tachibana took a deep breath, then launched into, "And now, it's time for our 'Hottest Meet-and-Greet' segment. Joining us today, we have a two-for-one special! After his last appearance was so well-received, we invited this rising young star back to the set to tell us more about his life as a high-school detective. Please welcome Goro Akechi and his crime-fighting cockatoo, Justice!"

A month ago, Akechi had believed that he was prepared for the indignities and inanities of being marketed as an idol, even one with a veneer of intellectualism. He had not been prepared for the indignity and inanity of the phrase "crime-fighting cockatoo." Even the cops who were deep enough in the conspiracy to know what he was capable of weren't going to take him seriously after this.

Akechi's forced smile fought for its life on its way up to his eyes. "It's an honor to be back."

Morgause spread her wings, drawing delighted gasps from the audience, and began whistling what Akechi recognized as the Featherman Victory theme. He scooped her up with both hands, pinning her wings down, and transferred her to the low back of his chair. Out of frame, out of mind, at least during close-ups.

"It seems Justice is excited to be here too," Amazaki said with a chuckle. "Akechi-kun, why don't you tell us how you two met?"

Akechi stroked a finger down Morgause's back, lingering with a little more pressure than necessary at her nape: Behave yourself, or I'll wring your neck until your tiny head pops off. Smiling into the camera, he said, "I came across him early in my career while assisting in the arrest of a suspect. I can't share too many details, of course, but I took one look at this poor animal and knew that he was far too spoiled to spend the rest of his life in a zoo, let alone out in the wild. Naturally, I had no choice but to take him in."

"What inspiring compassion, Akechi-kun!" Tachibana led the audience in a quick round of applause, with a few awwws sprinkled in.

"And I hear that he's proven not just a faithful pet," Amazaki said, "but a helpful sidekick, too. Can you tell us a little more about Justice's role in your detective work?"

Time to pivot. "He can be a very helpful sounding board when I'm trying to solve a case. Sometimes it helps to hear your own words repeated, and to be honest, it's a bit exciting to address my thoughts to Justice itself." Akechi paused for laughter before setting up the transition to the next topic: "Lately, one phrase has come up so often that he can't stop repeating it. Justice, why don't you tell the audience what I find so preoccupying?"

Morgause leaned forward, fixed Akechi with a beady-eyed stare, and squawked, "Pretty girls!"

Akechi was going to tie her to a brick and hurl it into an open sewer. Desperately hoping that his face wasn't as red as it felt, he stammered, "Haha, ha, that's, ah, not what I—"

"There's no need to be embarrassed, Akechi-kun!" said Amazaki, who also had a brick with his name on it. "Why, it's a perfectly natural preoccupation at your age!"

Tomorrow was going to be an absolute shit-show of unwanted confessions, accompanied by equally unwanted homemade bento. He was going to be up to his ears in goddamn octopus wieners. "That aside," Akechi said, at a louder volume and higher pitch than he intended, "I was referring to the Phantom Thieves."

With that, they were back on script, at least for the moment. Akechi seeded his talking points as planned, fleshing out the Detective Prince as someone deeply idealistic about the rule of law and positioning the Phantom Thieves as inherently opposed to it. Morgause kept her damn beak shut for that, at least.

The audience poll marked the next phase of the segment. Thirty percent professed their belief in the Phantom Thieves, most likely because the audience was packed with Shujin students who had witnessed the otherwise inexplicable self-destruction of their vile volleyball coach. If the general population had faith at that level, Shido would have already been firing at the targets that Akechi put on the culprits' backs.

But for now, Akechi's orders were to gather intel, so he feigned surprise at the result and cued the hosts to double-down on audience participation.

Specifically, the participation of one particular member of the audience.

Ren Amamiya, leader of the Phantom Thieves, convicted violent criminal and mastermind behind the ruin of at least two powerful men, slouched in his chair with all the charisma of a soft cabbage. Perhaps the fire in his eyes would have been visible if his glasses hadn't been smudged; regardless, Akechi had to make a point of catching Tachibana's eye and flicking his gaze toward his target, because almost everyone else in the audience radiated more appeal.

Amamiya stiffened and straightened up when she approached, microphone in hand. After his successes skulking in the shadows, Akechi looked forward to seeing how he handled the heat of the spotlight. What were his thoughts on the Phantom Thieves, hypothetically speaking, assuming they were real?

Without missing a beat, Amamiya said, "They do more than the cops."

Splendid. Akechi wanted to throw his head back and laugh at Amamiya's brazenness, but the mask he wore in the light couldn't get away with more than a demure chuckle and a wink. Morgause whistled a stock comedy sound effect.

As expected, Amazaki latched onto this little clash of opinions, providing Akechi with the opportunity to ask a followup question. If someone close to Amamiya, perhaps the friend sitting beside him, underwent a sudden change of heart, wouldn't he assume that the Phantom Thieves were behind it?

Amamiya's face betrayed nothing as he shook his head. "They only target criminals."

"How can you be certain of that?" Akechi focused on the cameras in his peripheral vision; keep it brief and light, he reminded himself, no matter how badly he wanted to dig in. "If there truly exist people who have the power to forcibly change the hearts of others, it would be naïve to assume they're using it only to extract confessions. Couldn't they just as easily force a law-abiding target to commit crimes?"

"Goodness, Akechi-kun," said Amazaki, "you're absolutely right!"

Tachibana resumed her seat beside him and added, "What a terrifying thought!"

Akechi raised his hands with a placating smile. "There's no cause for alarm. I'm merely speculating, after all."

He sat up a little straighter and made sure he was showing his best side to the active camera, but before he could segue into his next point, Morgause hopped from the back of the chair to the top of his head and squawked, "Phantom Thieves! Criminals! Joining us today!"

"He certainly picks up new words quickly, doesn't he?" Tachibana caught Akechi's pointed gaze, and ratings sparkled in her eyes. "Perhaps... Akechi-kun, do you think he's trying to tell us something?"

Morgause whistled and hopped down to Akechi's right shoulder.

This gambit in no way made up for the "pretty girls" remark, but Akechi intended to enjoy it regardless. Bringing his hand to his chin, he posed thoughtfully before saying, "Parrots have keener senses than humans, including ultraviolet vision. It's possible that he's picked up on a clue we can't detect."

"Oh my! Akechi-kun, do you think the infamous Phantom Thieves might be somewhere in our studio?"

Don't go for the kill, Akechi reminded himself. Give them light laughter devoid of sharp edges. A perfectly symmetrical smile without teeth. "We can't rule anything out at this point, but I think we'd be far more likely to find some small piece of evidence hinting at their identities, assuming they exist. Still, perhaps we should all close our eyes and ask any Phantom Thieves present to raise their hands?"

Everyone but the guilty parties laughed. All eyes were open and on Akechi, enraptured. This was the part that made the intolerable bullshit almost worthwhile, when he could bask in the adoration of those who would have scraped him off the bottoms of their shoes two years ago. What they adored was only a mask, of course, but wasn't that always how it worked? No one showed up at their naked worst and expected to be loved.

From the corner of his eye, Akechi watched Sakamoto's face reflect a journey from confusion to concern. Takamaki leaned over to whisper something, and the two of them turned to stare at Amamiya, whose attention was still focused on stage. Enraptured. Akechi gave him another wink.

Playing along, Amazaki said, "Wouldn't it be exciting if one of our segments contained a vital clue that brought criminals to justice?"

"Our nation would owe you a great debt, to be sure," Akechi replied. "I can also assure you that the police are hard at work investigating the truth behind the mysterious incidents and won't let a single clue slip past them. In fact, I'm working alongside them on these cases."

A glance confirmed that the culprits under discussion were stewing in their seats. In particular, Sakamoto's entire body seemed to be vibrating against an incriminating outburst.

"Then it sounds like we're in very good hands," Tachibana said. "Everyone, let's give Akechi-kun and Justice a round of applause for their dedication!"

The gratifying sounds that followed were somewhat spoiled by the inclusion of "and Justice," but the show was done, and Akechi had played his role superbly despite adverse conditions. Mission accomplished. Time to exit the stage and wait out the rest of the taping.

If Shido happened to catch the interview, he would be furious about Morgause's presence, but Shido had fully delegated the monitoring and management of Akechi's media career. Akechi almost certainly wouldn't be getting an earful about "that goddamn creepy bird" unless he fucked up so spectacularly that Shido's Morgause-related animosity was the least of his problems.

The backstage cooing over Morgause was mercifully brief, hushed by the arrival of a self-proclaimed "summer trends expert" for the next segment. This summer's trends were expected to include higher temperatures, shorter skirts, and crowded beaches. Riveting stuff.

Morgause butted her beak against Akechi's ear and whispered, "I made you relatable. You're welcome."

Barely parting his lips, Akechi whispered back, "I'll be expressing my gratitude with a hammer."

"Would you rather deal with the rumors if you never show interest in girls?"

Akechi shot her a glare. "I gave Teen Vague a perfectly good answer to their question about my type."

"Oh yeah, what was it? 'A girl who doesn't need very much attention'? You should've workshopped that one."

"Eat shit."

"Did you say something, Akechi-kun?" asked the production assistant Akechi hadn't noticed approaching from behind.

Akechi aimed for a mildly abashed tone. "Ah, sorry, that was just Justice muttering to himself again. I'll keep him quiet."

She gave him the unimpressed look of a seasoned eavesdropper. "Make sure that you do, okay?" she said, holding out her hand and curling her fingers down to tap against her palm. "I'd hate for a hot mic to pick up something inappropriate."

Akechi gritted his teeth and slipped her two thousand yen.

When the show wrapped up, the student audience dispersed as if they were leaving their classroom at the end of the day. A few students beelined for freedom, clusters of friends lingered together, and a little nerd in the front row put the finishing touches on what looked like notes. For once, circumstances were aligning in Akechi's favor; his targets were among the lingerers, until Sakamoto took off at a sprint toward the restrooms. Better still, Takamaki headed for the exit alone, leaving Amamiya as isolated prey.

Akechi began his approach at a calculated pace and called out, "Ah! There you are, Amamiya-kun!"

Startled, Amamiya looked up at the perfect moment: too late to pretend he had been about to leave but early enough to realize he had been caught on his back foot, without being quite early enough to regain his equilibrium.

"I'm glad I caught up with you before you left," Akechi continued, without giving Amamiya a chance to respond. "Most members of an audience parrot whatever they think I want to hear, so your choice to debate me today was refreshing."

"Don't scare him off," Morgause hissed, having either forgotten or disregarded Akechi's explicit instructions not to talk in front of the other Metaverse users. "And 'parrot'? Really?"

Akechi patted one of the feet on his shoulder with barely restrained menace. "It sounds like Justice appreciated it too, haha. In any case, I wanted to thank you."

Like any good delinquent, Amamiya shrugged. "I just said what I think."

"Few people would have done so in your position. That willingness to speak your mind is a rare quality in this world, and one that I value greatly. To paraphrase Hegel—"

Morgause let out an ear-splitting squawk. "What did I just say about scaring him off?"

"Excuse me." Akechi grabbed Morgause with both hands, as tightly as he could without snapping any of her bones, and made a quick scan of the room. Spotting Yoshizawa and the assistant director hunched over a tablet together, he let a little malevolence seep into his whisper: "Why don't you go say hello to Yoshizawa-san?"

Without waiting for her reaction, he tossed her like a misshapen ball. Her wings flared and flapped just before she would have collided with Yoshizawa, startling both men. Her glare could have bored through glass, but she did perch on Yoshizawa's arm.

Not Akechi's proudest social or tactical moment, but there was no telling when Sakamoto might return, and he refused to squander this opportunity. And Yoshizawa didn't appear upset about having a cockatoo attached to him, for what that was worth.

"As I was saying," Akechi continued, relaunching his charm offensive, "hearing your thoughts today was quite valuable for me. If you're willing, I'd like to continue exchanging ideas with you."

Amamiya's expression remained neutral, but, Akechi thought, a little more deliberately so. "With or without the bird?"

"If I can possibly help it, without." He waited for the little snort of Amamiya's laugh before adding, "We can leave him outside with the cat."

One of Amamiya's hands twitched toward his bag. Subtle, but Akechi caught it. Amamiya's poker face was good enough to leave it unclear whether he had caught Akechi catching him. "Looking forward to it."

Typically when Akechi shook hands, he extended his right one to avoid the awkwardness that accompanied any deviation from a social norm. But this time he extended his left, and he noted with satisfaction that Amamiya didn't hesitate to match him. The first turn of a knot that Amamiya had no way of knowing would become a noose.

Akechi beamed. "Thank you," he said, perhaps a little too intensely. "I hope that this will prove a fruitful partnership for both of us. The key to advancement is the push and pull of opposition, after all."

It occurred to him that he should have let go of Amamiya's hand several seconds ago. Akechi pretended that a swallowed scream wasn't ricocheting inside him as he took out his phone to exchange contact information. For an unsettling moment, he felt a twinge in his chest, as if he were an anxious child still learning how to lie.

On his way to retrieve Morgause before Sakamoto could come bumbling back with unwashed hands, he heard the cat's voice ask, "What the heck is up with that guy?" If Amamiya answered, he kept his voice too low to carry over the other sounds in the studio.

Scaring Amamiya off wasn't a concern, no matter what Morgause thought. If anything, the risk lay in coming across as too innocuous to be interesting. Amamiya spent his free time playing vigilante in heeled boots and a tailcoat. He tweaked the nose of law enforcement on Tokyo's most popular morning talk show. And he was doing it all while on probation, one misstep away from ending up behind bars.

If anything, it would be advantageous for him to be suspicious of Akechi. Suspicion was the spice of interest.

Yoshizawa was gently scratching the back of Morgause's neck, suggesting either a genuine fondness for birds or a dedication to making sure all of his guests felt welcome regardless of species. Akechi's apologies were waved away by the insistence that no harm had been done.

Akechi's pride begged to differ, but he kept his face deferentially friendly as he held out his arm so that Morgause could hop back up to her usual spot.

"New promo clip for tomorrow's broadcast is up," said the assistant director. "Good work out there." Akechi tried not to think about which of many on-camera indignities was already making the rounds online.

"'Good work' is putting it mildly." Yoshizawa angled the tablet they were looking at toward Akechi, and while the graphs had no axis labels for context, Akechi didn't need context to tell that the lines were going up. "We're on track for our second-highest pre-broadcast social media engagement after the Risette exclusive. I certainly wouldn't want to interfere with your studies, Akechi-kun, but if you're able to make arrangements with your school, we'd love to make you and Justice a weekly feature."

Akechi would have to be able; if word got back to the station's president that he had turned down such an offer, he would be lucky if the worst Shido did was scream at him for being an ungrateful brat. He could only hope his inevitable weekly humiliations would prove popular enough to pry open the stubborn barrier at the bottom of Sheriruth.

"You don't have to give us an answer right away," Yoshizawa added, as if that would make a difference.

"I couldn't imagine turning down such an opportunity," Akechi said, throat tight to strain out the bitterness. "My school will have the final say, of course, but given my good academic standing, I believe I'll be able to negotiate half a day's absence each week."

Yoshizawa looked pleased, then alarmed by something over Akechi's shoulder. "Sumire! What brings you here?"

A slender reed of a girl in a Shujin uniform hurried across the studio, beaming. "We're cross-training at the aquatics center today, so I wanted to drop in on the way and say hi." She waved exuberantly at Yoshizawa as if he were far away. "So... hi, Dad!"

"What a lovely surprise," Yoshizawa said, though the skin around his eyes was tight. "Your coach isn't wondering where you are right now, is she?"

"Nope! I got permission." She clasped her hands behind her back. "How was the show today?"

"Highly successful, thanks to our captivating guests. Akechi-kun, this is my daughter, Sumire. Sumire, this is Goro Akechi and his bird, Justice."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Yoshizawa-san," Akechi said, tamping down his umbrage at the plural "guests."

He almost missed her return of the sentiment over Morgause's hiss of, "She's the crazy sister," as if Akechi couldn't connect those dots himself.

Sumire Yoshizawa didn't look like someone in the throes of maddening grief, but her proximity to the entertainment industry must have given her some idea of how to perform normalcy in public. "Nice to meet you, too, Justice-san," she said with a little bow. "Are you a talking bird? Like a parrot?"

"Clever bird!" Morgause squawked.

Yoshizawa chuckled. "He's a cockatoo, to be precise."

"Cacatua ophthalmica," Akechi specified. "As pets go, they're exceptionally needy."

The retaliatory wing in Akechi's face almost made him miss the look that passed between Yoshizawa and the assistant director before the latter said, "If you don't mind, I'd better get back to making the rounds with the crew."

"Perfect timing," Yoshizawa said, faux-casually, with the acting talent of a man who had never aspired to work in front of the camera. "Sumire, why don't I walk you to the aquatics center?"

The girl shook her head, ponytail swishing like the paper tail of a wind chime. "You don't have to do that, Dad. I know you're busy."

"I could do with some fresh air, and Shinguchi-kun has things under control here. You're not embarrassed to be seen in public with your old man, are you?"

"Of course not!"

Whatever family drama was attempting to insinuate itself between the lines of the conversation, Akechi wanted no part of it. "I should be going now, too," he said, already mid-step toward the door. "My agent will be in touch." His pace got him safely ahead of the Yoshizawa situation and the threat of having to walk out as a group.

"So," Morgause said as their retreat neared the end of the hallway, "how did trying to infiltrate the Phantom Thieves by namedropping a dead German guy work out for you?"

Akechi waited until he had excused his way through the lobby and out into the street before saying under his breath, "I got his number and chat ID, and you can shove them both sideways up your cloaca."

"Better make sure he hasn't already blocked you."

"If you're so eager to spend the next twenty-four hours growing a new body, I'll be more than happy to feed your current one to the next stray cat I see."

Morgause clicked her beak. "So you don't want the souvenir I swiped for you? Too bad. Your homeroom teacher would love it."

Killing her only ever made her more insufferable, anyway. With an annoyed grunt, Akechi cupped his left hand below his right shoulder. Morgause ducked her head into the thick feathers of her flank and sent something shiny tumbling into Akechi's palm.

A pin-back button of Risette's winking face, commemorating her appearance on Good Morning Japan the day before her latest album released. The signature beneath was obviously printed as part of the image, but it was a collector's item nonetheless. Enough of one to get Akechi out of the next lengthy after-school lecture about his attendance, at least.

Akechi slipped it into his pocket with a slightly less annoyed grunt.

Morgause chittered and butted the side of his head. "What would you do without me, hmm?"

Perhaps Akechi would have died without ever figuring out how to escape the Metaverse, or collapsed from exhaustion with the Reaper at his heels, or lost his nerve when Wakaba Isshiki's Shadow begged, Don't make my daughter an orphan. He found it far more likely that he would have gritted his teeth and persevered. Maybe a little more malnourished and sleep-deprived, but it wasn't as if his long-term health mattered.

And maybe Shido's faith in him would have solidified by now, without a suspicious magic bird constantly agitating it, and maybe his public image wouldn't have been rapidly descending into buffoonery. It didn't matter either way; he had chosen his path, and there was no point in wondering where another might have led.

"I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now," he decided, "but with lower blood pressure."

As if to underscore his point, his phone began vibrating with the pattern he had assigned to Shido's calls after Sunday's fiasco: five sharp beats with the rhythm of a fist pounding on a door, followed by a pause just long enough to be ominous. No mistaking that for anything else.

Letting it go to voicemail only ever made things worse.

"Cancel the Fukuyama job," Shido said, without preamble. "Maiasa Newspaper has just seen the wisdom of raising its editorial standards."

Suspended in the void where a rant was not, Akechi couldn't remember what the Fukuyama job was. "Yes, sir," he defaulted to.

Shido hmphed and closed the connection.

As Akechi slipped his phone back into his pocket, Morgause said, "So, remember the old guy we took out early yesterday so we wouldn't have to go all the way back down to Adyeshach?"

Chapter 3

Notes:

Starting with this chapter, I'm trotting out a variation on the workskin I made for Smoke Without Fire, because I'm an inveterate CSS goblin. Phone conversations should still be legible if you're hiding creator styles or using a screenreader; please let me know if they're not for you!

Chapter Text

Pointing out that Fukuyama, an old man who had been smoking heavily for more than half a century, could very well have collapsed from natural causes might have gone over better had Akechi not pointed it out less than forty-eight hours after being explicitly instructed not to inflict a mental shutdown on the man.

At least Akechi was getting yelled at from the comfort of his own sofa for a change, instead of struggling to keep a neutral expression in public. Going straight home after the mock entrance exam was turning out to be far from the worst of Morgause's suggestions.

The yelling was never the worst part, of course. Shido's temper was down to a simmer by the time he said, "Since you've having difficulty managing your own schedule, I'll do you a favor and remove the temptation to jump the gun. From now on, when I assign you a target, you'll have no more than twenty-four hours to get the job done."

Shido needed to believe that he had Akechi on a leash. The plan depended on it. Akechi still loathed feeling Shido tug at it just to pull him off balance. "Sir, we agreed—"

"I'm confident that you'll rise to the challenge. You've always worked well under pressure."

Akechi wasn't about to argue against that. Instead he took a deep breath before saying, "Yes, sir."

"That's more like it." When Shido didn't immediately end the call, Akechi felt the muscles in his back begin to knit themselves together.

"And keep in mind," Shido said, after letting the silence spool out past the point of discomfort, "that the Detective Prince exists to charm the masses while delivering his assigned talking points, not do goddamn manzai routines. If your desire to make a fool of yourself in public does too much damage to your credibility, this little media experiment is over. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal, sir."

The call ended, and Akechi dragged both hands down his face, fingers clawing at his fringe.

Morgause clicked her beak from her perch on the back of the sofa. "What an asshole."

Akechi dropped his left hand and whipped his head around to glare at her. "This is your fault!"

"How so?"

"It was your fucking idea!"

"Typical. It's always 'We didn't kill that guy, I killed that guy' with you until something like this happens."

With a growl, Akechi lunged for her. She squawked at a neighbor-alarming volume and narrowly evaded. His followup didn't even come close to connecting, now that she was airborne and alert. She also had nothing blocking her way to the open window, which she flew through in a flurry of feathers.

No Detective Prince would scream out a window at a bird. Akechi clutched the inside of the sill and silently seethed.

Hanging upside down from a nearby utility pole, Morgause glared at him with one blue-ringed eye. "Get yourself under control, kid. He's still dependent on you, and he damn well knows it. Go ride your bike or something until you blow off enough steam to finish your homework."

Akechi had himself perfectly under control. He slammed the window shut to prove it.

Any desire to ride his bike having just gone up in a flash fire, he considered his options. Going to Mementos on his own never worked; Morgause always tracked him down, even when he entered far from Shibuya Station and trekked across the eerily silent surface. Going bouldering felt too much like doing what Morgause wanted him to. Throwing himself back into the Sisyphean slog of his homework risked proving that Morgause had been right about the steam.

A knock on his door gave Akechi another problem to resent dealing with. He smoothed his hair and shirt on his way to peer through the peephole.

The fisheye lens distorted the hunched figure of Ono, Akechi's ancient neighbor, into a scowling bulbous head. As usual, he must have picked the least convenient time to turn on his hearing aid.

Forcing a pleasant expression, Akechi opened the door just enough to reveal his face. "Good morning, Ono-san. Is there something I can help you with?"

Ono's expression didn't soften. "What on earth was all that racket?"

"There were some crows fighting just outside my window. Fortunately, they seem to have moved on."

"Don't go leaving trash on your balcony. It attracts them." To Akechi's dismay, Ono pressed two fingers behind his right ear. He also liked to pick the least convenient times to turn off his hearing aid.

Steady breaths. Steady smile. Keep performing. "I'm well aware. That's why I'm always careful to follow the trash disposal rules, for the sake of everyone in the building."

"That's how you get crows, you know. Leaving your trash on the balcony."

"I assure you, I've never left trash on my balcony."

"So don't do it again, or I'll have to have another chat with the building manager." Ono shuffled away on his walker, and Akechi resisted the urge to slam the door so hard behind him that the hinges would rattle.

And Sunday had been off to such a promising start, too, with a breeze of a mock exam and an unexpected chance to establish dominance over the lesser Niijima sister, all without anyone squawking unwelcome commentary into his ear or chastising him from a position of abusive authority. If Akechi was especially unlucky, Ono might have that chat with the building manager after all, and he would once again have to waste his precious time assuaging her concerns over a teenage boy living alone.

Whatever Akechi was doing with the rest of his day, he wasn't going to be doing it in this goddamn building. He made himself presentable, secured a stack of worksheets and textbooks in his briefcase, and headed for Kichijoji Station.

Out of aimless habit he got on the Chuo Line, then transferred to the Yamanote Line. When he got off at Shibuya Station, he stopped telling himself that he might be going anywhere other than Mementos. Morgause was welcome to fight him to the death about it.

Because the universe had it out for Akechi personally, his phone started vibrating as he wended his way toward the Buchiko-mae Square exit. A steady beat, so at least Shido wasn't already springing a short-notice assignment on him, but seeing Sae's name on the screen felt only marginally better. He bit his tongue and ducked into an alcove to answer.

"I've found another potential connection between several of the rampage incidents," Sae said, without greeting or preamble. "I could use your help reevaluating evidence in light of it."

Of course she had. Paying for Akechi's services was a privilege reserved for the upper echelons of Shido's supporters, all of whom ran in the same overlapping circles of power. When you pulled at the thread of any high-profile case, it was bound to catch on others weaving through the same government offices and boards of directors. What frustrated Sae and obscured the conspiracy was the lack of a consistent answer to "Cui bono?"

The balancing act of providing her with clever-but-not-too-clever insights was exhausting, so Akechi put off having to perform it: "Perhaps this one will finally lead us to a breakthrough. I look forward to hearing your theory when I join you tomorrow after school."

After a pointed pause, Sae said, "You took the national mock exam with Makoto, didn't you? You should be free now."

"I'm afraid I've already made plans for the rest of the day."

"Of course." There was venom in Sae's voice, undiluted by her sigh. "You have the luxury of taking a day off without being perceived as insufficiently committed to your work. Assuming you still intend to continue working as a detective, that is. Judging by what I watched yesterday, you might be more interested in pursuing a career as a comedian."

Monday was going to be miserable. Swallowing as much of his own venom as he could stomach, Akechi replied, "I may have made it look easy to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but it's surprisingly challenging. To be honest, I'm a bit envious of people who have given up on appealing to anyone."

"Could have fooled me," Sae said, and ended the call.

Escaping the conversation had been the goal, but losing the last word still stung. Akechi took a moment to wipe the scowl off his face before resuming his walk toward the wide stairs leading up out of the station.

A familiar flicker drew his attention to his left, where he spotted what had to be Amamiya in front of an overpriced healthy drinks stand. There were plenty of other lanky boys with messy hair and glasses in Tokyo, but the cat sticking out of the bag was definitively identifying.

"You need to get pumped up," the cat was saying, with just as much regard for volume as Morgause ever displayed. Akechi didn't even have to try to sneak up on them. "It's for your health, so... chug!"

On cue, Amamiya put the cup to his lips and threw his head back. The lump in his throat bobbed frantically. After a final gulp, he doubled over and coughed into his elbow.

"You did it!" the cat cheered, still oblivious of Akechi's approach.

Amamiya wasn't noticing much of anything with his face in his arm, either, so Akechi sidled up close before asking, "How was it?"

There was a yowl and a started cough, but Amamiya recovered gracefully enough to straighten up as his cat burrowed out of sight. "Worth it for the collagen," he replied, slightly hoarse. He cleared his throat, which his expression suggested had the unfortunate side effect of bringing some of the taste back into his mouth. "So how about it? Is my skin more radiant now?"

Akechi brought his thumb and forefinger to his chin, feigning consideration. "I can't say I got a good enough look at it beforehand to judge."

"Should've taken a picture, I guess." Amamiya crushed the empty cup in his hand and made a faux-casual show of tossing it several meters into a bin. "So what brings the Detective Prince to Shibuya today?"

If Akechi hadn't already been certain that he was working the correct angle, the last few seconds would have confirmed it. Morgause had never been more wrong about him scaring someone off. "Just enjoying a day off after a busy week. You know, I didn't intend to take you up on our deal so soon, but meeting up like this feels a bit like fate, doesn't it?"

"Careful with this guy," said the cat's voice, muffled.

Amamiya nodded and shrugged the shoulder that wasn't holding up his bag, as much a response to the cat as an invitation for Akechi to keep talking.

"I wouldn't want to impose," Akechi continued, "but if you're free, perhaps we could spend some time together today."

The bag unzipped slightly to let the cat's voice ring clear: "Hey, weren't you on your way to work at the flower shop?"

Amamiya zipped it back up. "Sure, I'm free."

"Excellent. How would you feel about a round or two of billiards? I know just the place for it, and I've been hoping to find a worthy opponent to play against."

With a slice of a smile, Amamiya replied, "Lead the way."

Got him.

The playbook wrote itself in Akechi's head: alternate fawning attention with goading challenges, infuse conversations with plausibly deniable innuendo, bend over a little too provocatively and pretend not to notice him staring. Make him believe that this decoy mask was the true one and let him imagine hooking his fingers beneath it. Never let it feel so easy that he lost interest.

Things were going so smoothly that Akechi should have expected the talons in his shoulder the moment he exited the station back at Kichijoji, but he still had to bite back a shout.

Amamiya, like anyone who didn't habitually have a big bird swoop in front of his face, gasped and shielded himself with both arms. The cat yelped a complaint from inside the bag.

"What the hell is this?" Morgause demanded before Akechi could say anything.

Ignoring the question, Akechi said to Amamiya, "Sorry about that. As I warned you, Justice can be poorly behaved, especially when he's excited to see me."

"As excited as you are to finish your homework," she muttered.

Amamiya resumed his usual slouch. "It's cool. So you just let him fly loose all over the city?"

"More or less. Keeping him cooped up in my apartment hardly seems fair, especially given that his sense of direction is strong enough that he always finds his way home." Akechi looked pointedly at the bag. "Don't you worry your cat will get lost in an unfamiliar area?"

Amamiya unzipped the bag, giving up the pretense that there wasn't obviously a cat inside it. "Mona always comes back to me. He's too smart to get lost."

"Of course I am!" The cat's head and shoulders fully emerged. "Joker, I'm getting the same weird feeling from that bird."

Morgause ruffled her feathers and flexed her talons. "I can make that cat feel a lot worse than 'weird.'"

Amamiya made a shushing noise so quick and quiet that Akechi nearly missed it while directing the same sound toward Morgause.

Interesting.

Did Amamiya's concern that Akechi might hear his cat reflect his own ability to hear Morgause? Nothing she had said around him so far was incriminating, though her outburst at the studio had certainly been provocative. For that matter, everything the cat—Mona—said around Akechi had been equally provocative and unincriminating. Neither of them had let slip a word about the Metaverse.

Perhaps they were both mouthing off as bait, angling to elicit a reaction that proved their speech had been understood. Or perhaps this was giving both creatures too much credit. It was more likely they were cut from the same mouthy supernatural cloth, and Amamiya simply had enough brain cells on his own to be suspicious of another ever-present monochromatic animal companion.

"What an interesting thing for us to have in common," Akechi said smoothly, leading the way down Harmony Alley. "Convenient, too. There should be no trouble leaving them both to fend for themselves outside while we play."

"Play?" Morgause squawked, with the tinny warble of mimicry. Akechi waited to see if Amamiya would spend an uncertain moment deciding whether to react.

He didn't. "We're playing billiards," he replied, addressing Morgause as if she were part of the conversation. "I bet we're going to Penguin Sniper."

"Oh?" Akechi said. "You're familiar with the establishment?"

Amamiya nodded. "Ryuji took me there for darts."

Darts would make for a good future outing, one that would offer insight into how Amamiya rose to a challenge the likes of which he would never get from someone like Sakamoto. Before Akechi could propose it, Amamiya added, "Why do they call it Penguin Sniper? I didn't see a penguin mascot."

"Presumably they liked the sound of the English words together and didn't give much consideration to the meaning," Akechi replied. "That's usually how marketing works, after all."

The cat made an exasperated noise. "This guy's so annoying. We could be getting paid to make bouquets right now."

Amamiya looked thoughtful for a moment before saying, "The eight-ball looks kind of like a penguin, doesn't it?"

More so than the other balls, at least. Akechi considered the point as they reached the wide street where their destination awaited them. "By that logic, striking a ball with the cue stick would constitute 'sniping' it, yes? However, only the cue ball can be sniped. Typically, snipers don't rely on ricochets to hit their target."

Morgause, who hadn't been the center of attention for at least a minute, puffed herself up and squawked, "Cockatoo Sniper!"

Amamiya let out a surprised laugh. "The cue ball does look kind of like Justice."

Mercifully, they had reached the stairwell leading up to the entrance. "We won't have the chance for a side-by-side comparison, unfortunately," Akechi said, flicking his fingernail against Morgause's foot. "No birds allowed in Penguin Sniper."

"I can see how the name would give him the wrong idea," Amamiya said, lowering his bag to let Mona jump out.

The cat gave him a baleful look on the way down. "I got to go inside last time."

"Don't forget to keep your phone on," Morgause said spitefully, as if Akechi might have been stupid enough to risk letting Shido go to voicemail today. She raised up her crest and squawked, "Justice!" before launching herself off his shoulder.

As he led the way up the stairs, Akechi said, "Your cat's certainly chatty. I imagine it would be quite distracting for you if his noises sounded like actual words."

"They might as well," Amamiya replied. "I'm getting the hang of what his different meows mean."

How thrilling, Akechi thought, that he understood the game. Time to see how well he could play two games at once.

As the one who issued the invitation, Akechi paid for them both and put himself in charge of picking the table farther away from the dartboards. It didn't escape his notice how closely Amamiya watched him rack the balls and chalk his cue stick. An attempt to throw Akechi off his game would have been much less subtle; Amamiya had to be a novice trying to pass himself off as experienced.

So the trick would be to play well but not too well, swaying on the line between skill and luck. Let Amamiya wonder what he had gotten himself into. See how long it took him to realize that Akechi was going easy on him, but not so easy that he had any chance to win.

Akechi preened internally as his opening shot with his non-dominant hand sank a ball. "Oh, my apologies," he said sweetly. "A break ace."

Amamiya had a decent poker face, but Akechi could still hear the gears turning under his unruly mop of hair. "Lucky shot, huh?"

"If I were a pool shark looking to hustle you, I would have made you put your money down first." Akechi laughed, willing a crinkle under his eyes. "That was a joke, of course. We'll start over to keep things fair."

He bent a little deeper into the second break, sneaking a glance at Amamiya's face as the balls scattered. In the same instant, Amamiya's gaze snapped from Akechi's ass to his eyes, and Amamiya's eyebrow rose: Caught you catching me.

Now that was trying to throw Akechi off his game.

After a few turns, Akechi confirmed that Amamiya was a talented amateur. His techniques were basic but competently executed, and he even pulled off a simple curve shot after watching Akechi perform one. Of course, being a quick learner could take him only so far against superior skill; he misjudged the force needed for a critical shot and all but handed the victory to Akechi.

As Amamiya straightened back up from his flub, he said, "At least your talking bird isn't here to make fun of me."

Lining up his next shot gave Akechi a moment to school his expression. "You realize that the 'talking' in 'talking bird' is something of a misnomer, don't you?"

"How so?"

"Mimicry is a far cry from comprehension." Akechi's research into the subject had been conducted over two years ago, but he excelled at both retaining information and projecting confidence. Eyes fixed on his target, he slid the cue stick back and forth between his fingers as he continued, "Imagine someone who learns to sing a song in a language they don't know by memorizing the sounds. No matter how perfectly they can recreate those sounds, they would be unable to rearrange them meaningfully." With a smooth snap of his right arm, he pocketed his second-to-last ball. "Similarly, talking birds may associate the production of particular sounds with particular stimuli, but they don't understand those sounds as the building blocks of words and phrases."

Amamiya hummed. "You sure about that?"

"Very much so. What would lead you to believe otherwise?"

"How did Justice come up with 'Cockatoo Sniper'?"

Fucking Morgause. Akechi felt his smile stiffen and cool, with no hope of reaching his eyes, but he kept his tone light. "He often mixes in familiar sounds, like 'cockatoo,' with sounds that he's only just heard, like 'sniper.' Naturally, a few of those random combinations will sound meaningful. The human mind is eager to invent connections where none exist."

"Fair point." Amamiya watched Akechi sink his last ball before saying, "Aren't you left-handed?"

Despite the company he kept, Amamiya was as sharp as a tack slipped onto the seat of a chair. He knew it, too; he kept his expression neutral and his tone casual, but only a blinding glint from his glasses could have obscured the gleam in his eyes, and the lighting in Penguin Sniper was not cooperating.

"I'm honestly impressed that you noticed," Akechi replied, blood thrumming with the same chemicals that usually accompanied letting loose on the battlefield. "I am, but I'm also rather dextrous with my right hand, as I've demonstrated. I switched hands for our game because it would have been a bit gauche to go all-out against my junior, no?"

Amamiya smirked, as if Akechi hadn't just handily beaten him. "Don't hold back next time."

Akechi imagined how the challenging tilt of his mouth would fall in horror if Akechi cornered him in the Metaverse, away from the little friends propping him up, and showed him just how inferior he was. "How about this, then," Akechi said, keeping in check the bizarre urge to bite him. "If you can win against my right hand, I'll take you on with everything I've got. Deal?"

"Deal."

The twinge Akechi had felt in his chest at the studio returned, sharper and deeper, and left a lingering ache. He was confident that his expression remained neutral, at least until a flickering haze over Amamiya's head made him squint. An impression of blue, splotched with black? When Akechi stopped trying to focus on it, the muddled black clarified into a spoked wheel below the letter "X."

"Something in your eye?" Amamiya asked.

Akechi took the excuse to shake his head and blink rapidly. When he looked back up, the illusion had vanished. "Just a stray eyelash," he said. "Do you have time for another round?"

Amamiya had time for two more rounds, neither of which he won but during which he noticeably improved, progressing from copying Akechi's movements to improvising variations on them. More than ever, Akechi was eager to stalk him through the Metaverse and see him in action.

To avoid a repeat of the conversational situation on the way to Penguin Sniper, Akechi bade Amamiya farewell and made an excuse to linger inside. By the time he exited, the coast was clear and he had to contend only with Morgause swooping down to his shoulder.

"Took you long enough," she groused. "Well? Did you get anything useful out of him?"

A brief, cryptic apparition that reeked of the Metaverse, but Akechi intended to keep that to himself. "I established a rapport. If I don't build things up properly, he'll get spooked."

Morgause eyed him skeptically. "You're not letting this guy get into your head, are you?"

"You should be more concerned about how you're getting into his." Akechi dropped his voice lower to add, "Watch your damn mouth around him."

Her wing dismissively slapped his ear. "I know what I'm doing. You watch that you don't establish too much of a rapport. Any bonds you form will siphon power away from your Personas."

Spending time with Morgause sapped Akechi's power to act like a normal person in public, but she never seemed concerned about that. "Surely my power isn't so weak that a few conversations will drain it," he said dryly. "What makes you so sure about how this works, anyway?"

"Instinct. The same way I know how to fly and where Shadows are in Mementos. And I've never been wrong about that, have I?"

Akechi shot her an unimpressed look. "Was it instinct that made you think killing Fukuyama a day early would be a good idea?"

With a huff, she bit a lock of his hair and tugged hard enough to make him hiss. Trying to pull free only made her flap her wings against his face. He managed a light, "Ah, careful there," to deflect the attention of passers-by.

When Morgause finally let go, she shifted her weight around on his shoulder, digging her talons in unnecessarily deep. "Go straight home," she said, as if Akechi weren't already headed in that direction. "You've got homework to finish."

They could have the usual fight, Akechi figured, or he could play his cards right and put her in a more cooperative mood. A deep breath, a silent count up to ten, and there was no trace of vitriol in his voice when he said, "Actually, I thought we might stop by that nikuman stall on the way."

"The one with the super-stuffed buns?" Morgause bobbed her head suspiciously. "Who do you want me to spend all day tomorrow trailing?"

Pleased to be on the same page, Akechi adjusted his trajectory toward the stall. "Their 'hideout'
is a public accessway, yes? They're bound to show up sooner or later to plot their next move, so I need you to stake it out until they do."

If the Phantom Thieves were hunting for targets at the intersection of rich, powerful, and corrupt, the odds were high they'd go after another of Shido's cash cows. This time Akechi intended to present Shido with the name of a target long before that target showed up sniveling on the news. Surely that would go a long way toward rebuilding trust.

"Get me two, then," Morgause said. "I'm not hanging around all afternoon without a snack."

For all her many, many faults, Morgause could be trusted with surveillance. When the Phantom Thieves next gathered in the Teikyu Building Accessway, there was no doubt she would be eavesdropping from the shadows of the ceiling and reporting back immediately. Meanwhile, their leader had already swallowed the hook that Akechi so artfully baited. Everything was in place; he needed only be patient.

Yet Akechi felt as if he had finished a jigsaw puzzle and somehow ended up with an extra piece. He had never hallucinated in his life, even when he used to pretend he wasn't present in his own body, so the symbols he saw over Amamiya's head must have been real. They had to mean something. Was that "X" as in an unknown value? "X" as in the map marker for a police box? "X" as in wrong?

He had no idea how to begin decoding the message, and he wouldn't trust any answers from Morgause. If he wanted more information, he was going to have it get it from Amamiya, or at least from the space above Amamiya's head.

So Akechi lingered in Shibuya Station on Monday morning near the Ginza Line track bound for Aoyama-Itchome, monitoring the crowds in his peripheral vision while staring down the fruit Danish he had purchased from Yon-Germain. In addition to the sickly sweet fruit filling, a thick sugary glaze coated the pastry. Just thinking about eating it made him jittery. The coffee wasn't enticing, either, scalding hot and smelling faintly burnt.

He was discreetly blowing on the contents of his cup when he spotted his quarry queueing up on the platform. Amamiya brushed his hands over his white shirt as he waited, doing little to remove the black fur stuck to it. His distraction made it almost too easy to approach undetected.

"Fancy seeing you here," Akechi said, as if he hadn't spent the last twenty minutes lying in wait. Amamiya's instant of surprise gave him a chance to add, "I hope you're not too sore about the outcome of our billiards competition."

"Not sore at all," Amamiya replied. "You?"

"It's difficult to feel sore about being on a winning streak, wouldn't you say?"

"Don't get too used to it. I'll be getting some practice in this week."

Not at the expense of his vigilante activities, Akechi hoped; Morgause got restless staking out the same location multiple days in a row with nothing to report, and he didn't want to hear about it. He tucked the thought behind a pleasant smile as he said, "You're quite competitive, aren't you? I'm fortunate to have found someone so dedicated to becoming a match for me. You'll be keeping me on my toes in no time."

Did that work as innuendo? Amamiya's expression suggested that he wasn't sure, either, but was learning toward yes. "If you want," he said, "I can message you next time I go to Penguin Sniper to practice. No pressure if you're busy."

"I'll do my best to make time in my schedule," Akechi replied, picking up the cat's muttered "Why, though?" from inside the bag. Still nothing over Amamiya's head. He took a sip of his coffee, having forgotten that it still had the temperature and taste of watered-down lava, and the noise he made suppressing his sputter might have been worse than what it covered up.

As Akechi got himself under control, Amamiya leaned in, much too close, and sniffed the coffee. "The beans are over-roasted. Add cream if you want to drink that."

"Thanks for the advice," Akechi said, hand twitching against the urge to throw the coffee in Amamiya's face. There were still no wheels or letters flickering in his peripheral vision, so he used the approach of the train to excuse himself. "Well, I wouldn't want to make you late for school. I'm sure we'll run into each other again soon."

He intended to dispose of the coffee the moment the train pulled away, but it occurred to him that the alternative was buying another energy drink from a vending machine, and he didn't want to see tabloid headlines like "Detective Prince Setting Unhealthy Example for Children?" Was he even being marketed to the tween-and-under crowd? The "crime-fighting cockatoo" probably was. Fucking Morgause.

Akechi scooped up two packets of creamer from the counter at Yon-Germain and resentfully sipped his adulterated coffee as he waited for his train. To his irritation, it became palatable.

In retaliation for his declining to work on Sunday, Sae kept Akechi unreasonably late, without even the consolation of conveyor belt sushi. His emergency apple sustained him through her annoyingly astute observations about the prevalence of restaurant-related incidents. Not that Akechi gave a shit if Okumura made himself a person of interest with his insatiable appetite for scandals, but he was almost certainly Shido's biggest donor by now, and god forbid anything cut into Shido's scotch-and-cigars budget.

Thinking about Shido made Akechi set a hand over his pocket for the third time in an hour, unable to otherwise convince himself that he was only imagining his phone's vibrations. He needed to focus. To deflect.

He brought up the Diet member streaking through an airport in March, the Christmas Eve yacht hijacking, and, with conscious detachment, the catastrophic tunnel fire from last October, then waited in polite silence as Sae tried to invent connections to food.

"Could there be multiple culprits driving people to these rampages?" she mused at length, tapping her pen against a heavily highlighted page.

This was a little too close to correct, so Akechi said, "Given that we still have no evidence these incidents are anything more than spontaneous mental breakdowns, we should focus on determining how any culprit could be responsible before we jump to considering who that culprit could be."

"Focusing on 'how' has gotten us nowhere. Focusing on 'why' will allow us to identify potential suspects, and we can always interrogate their methods out of them." Sae flipped through several pages until she arrived at one of her many cluster diagrams. "For instance, someone with strong financial ties to the restaurant industry, conspiring with someone seeking to undermine the Transport Safety Board—"

Akechi feigned suppressing a laugh. "Conspiracy theories, really? You must be suffering from a lack of sleep, Sae-san. That sort of thing is even worse for your skin than using the wrong moisturizer."

She scowled at that, and after a tense moment said, "Go home, Akechi-kun. It's a school night."

The sun had already set by the time he made it outside, but Akechi didn't have any Mementos jobs, at least not yet, and so remained cautiously optimistic that he might finish his homework before Morgause harried him to bed. He even got a head start on it when a seat opened up on the train.

Morgause descended on him as soon as he exited Kichijoji Station, put her beak near his ear, and got right to the point: "The Phantom Thieves are being blackmailed."

This development was at once hilarious, inevitable, and irksome, as it occurred to Akechi how much he would have enjoyed being the first to elicit Amamiya's reaction to being backed into that particular corner. "By who?"

"Makoto Niijima."

"Are you kidding me?" came out much too loudly. There were enough passers-by that Akechi hastened to add at the same volume, "I thought Miel et Crepes would be open for dinner," the first thing he could think of that a mild-mannered Detective Prince with a sweet tooth might be driven to shout about.

Most of what he knew about Makoto Niijima came second-hand through Sae, who sometimes bragged about her younger sister's exam scores and extracurricular activities. Akechi liked to casually one-up her achievements, hoping that Sae would hold him up later as the higher standard she should strive for. His occasional direct interactions with her had never given him cause to think she was anything but an anxious little bootlicker. And now studious, obedient Makoto Niijima had deduced the identities of a supernatural vigilante group and was using that knowledge to blackmail them.

This development was almost purely hilarious, and Morgause should have kept it under wraps until Akechi could cackle about it in the relative privacy of his apartment.

"Who put her up to it?" he asked, because the girl he ran into yesterday had not carried herself like someone about to revel in exerting control over others.

Morgause's wing rubbed against his ear in a shrug. "Who'd use her to deliver a threat? I bet she's doing this on her own."

A fair enough conclusion. "And what are her demands?"

"She wants them to change someone's heart, but she wouldn't say whose. She's meeting up with them again tomorrow to share the details."

Less hilarious than trying to extort money from underclassmen, but certainly more intriguing. Was she concerned for her sister's safety while investigating an infamous criminal, or was she involved in some sort of trouble she didn't want her sister to know about? Had a teacher denied her a precious letter of recommendation?

Akechi pondered the possibilities as he rode the elevator up to his apartment, but he found it difficult to focus on anything but the absurdity of the situation. The tension in the Niijima home had to be thick enough to choke on, at least during the scant time both sisters were present and awake. Did Sae have even the faintest idea what her little sister was getting up to while she worked late every night?

Morgause was waiting for him on the back of the sofa when he let himself inside. As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, he said, "It was Sakamoto who gave them away, wasn't it?"

Morgause panted out one of her weird little bird-laughs, feathers puffing around her face. "She got a recording of him yelling about being a Phantom Thief."

Akechi threw his head back and laughed until Ono pounded on their shared wall.

On Wednesday night, Akechi fell asleep in an unusually good mood after pulling off a Mementos job with six hours' notice, despite once again having to compensate for Okumura's refusal to specify a target by name. All of his homework was done. Shido told him he was getting back on track after he reported that the Phantom Thieves were following a trail that could only lead to Junya Kaneshiro. His agent finally accepted that he would not be recording a novelty pop song under any circumstances. There hadn't been any deletion-worthy comments on his food blog in almost three days.

On Thursday morning, he made the mistake of checking the news.

In Akechi's experience, rampaging frontline fast food workers often started fires, but few of them caused more than minor kitchen damage or customer-alarming feats of napkin combustion. Rampaging fast food factory workers harbored the same desire, according to Akechi's single data point, but they could cause far greater devastation.

The live video zoomed in on the black column of smoke still rising over the Haneruya factory in Chiba, hours after the blaze had finally been contained. Even when with the audio muted, it was obvious the newscasters were repeating the same facts over and over. Through luck or fate or whatever unknowable power kept fucking with him, the first employee whose name Akechi could find was someone who knew how to disable an industrial fire suppression system.

The chyron updated with the casualty count. Last year's tunnel fire had been worse, but Akechi still found himself giving up on breakfast in favor of staring at the TV.

Morgause's head interrupted his view of the screen. "If you want to feel weird about this, feel weird about it after school. Finish your—" she angled herself to read the wrapper on the bar Akechi hadn't done more than nibble at— "Big Berry Pocket Protein."

"It tastes like shit."

"So what? Eat it so you don't starve."

Akechi shifted focus from the screen to glare at her. "Skipping breakfast isn't going to kill me."

"It might if you keep doing it."

"Fuck off with whatever point you think you're making." Akechi's thumb thoughtlessly unlocked his phone, revealing an email notification from Good Morning Japan's assistant producer. He jammed the phone between the sofa cushions and let his gaze tumble back into the glowing gravity of the television.

An injury ticked over into the fatalities column, pushing it into the double digits. He was going to have to talk about this tomorrow, wasn't he? He was going to have to get through the briefing about it today. Somehow he would have to portray just the right level of grief for a morning show, neither anguished nor flippant, grave like a visit to a cemetery on a sunny day. What the hell were they going to poll the audience about?

With a huff, Morgause seized the remote with her foot and turned the TV off. "Get it together, kid. Last October—" Seeming to think better of bringing that up, she cleared her throat and said, "Two months ago you derailed a train."

Two months ago, Akechi had expected casualties; instead, the only victim who wasn't expected to make at least a partial recovery was the engineer, who had been doomed to become a drooling husk regardless of how the accident played out. Akechi hadn't expected much of anything with this job other than production delays and unhappy investors.

The tunnel fire had been worse, but he couldn't let himself think about how much worse, because the tunnel fire had also been when he swore off keeping count.

When Akechi didn't say anything, Morgause added, "Statistically, those people were probably all pieces of shit. You think any of them ever lost sleep over someone like you?"

Only one person had ever lost sleep over Akechi, and she would have lived longer if she hadn't. "I'm aware."

Morgause's head tilted until the black bullets of her eyes were stacked in a vertical line. "You wanna call it quits over this?"

Akechi's lip curled away from his teeth. "Of course not."

Twenty minutes ago, while he was staring blankly into the bathroom mirror, Shido had left a rare purely complimentary voicemail to inform him that the client was delighted with his results. Akechi replayed it for a fourth time before deleting it.

He didn't have to talk about it on Friday, after all. At Yoshizawa's suggestion, the hosts led the studio audience in a moment of silence before pivoting to fire prevention tips for your home and workplace. Akechi was tasked with stating the obvious: Don't put metal utensils in a microwave. Don't leave a candle burning unattended. Always fully extinguish and properly dispose of cigarettes—or stop smoking altogether, and enjoy a longer and healthier life. The audience members were polled on whether they had replaced the batteries in their smoke detectors within the last six months.

Morgause was, if not quite subdued, more judicious about seizing the spotlight. The worst she did was mimic a fire alarm too accurately and for much too long.

It was simple and stupid, and it put everything back into simple, stupid perspective. The segment after Akechi's was about a new fortunetelling trend that used autocomplete to determine romantic compatibility. Numbers rose and fell in the measurement of stocks and temperatures. Akechi still left the studio feeling like a plug loose in its socket, connecting through sparking arcs of electricity.

As he turned out Morgause's suggestions for what he ought to do about dinner, his phone buzzed twice in his pocket.

| ||Friday, Jun 1717:1452% 🔋
Ren Amamiya
Ren:

Hey

You free

Akechi:I could spare some time this evening.

You know, I was beginning to suspect you'd thought better of inviting me to join you for billiards practice.

Ren:

Nah just didn't have time for it this week

Some stuff came up

Not really in the mood for it now

You ever been to a batting cage

Akechi:Not as such, but I've swung a bat before. I take it you're proposing an outing?

Ren:

I know a place where you can hit all the balls you want for 500 yen

Great for stress relief

Akechi:Quite a bit has come up for me this week, as well. I could do with a bit of stress relief.

Ren:

Is Yongen-Jaya too far for you

Akechi:I can manage it. You won't mind showing me the ropes, will you, since it's my first time?

Ren:

I'll show you the bats and balls too

Meet you at the station at 7

Chapter 4

Notes:

I very much appreciate La Temperanza's work skin CSS and tutorial for making Akechi's very-normal-and-not-obsessive notebook pages possible. :) (You should see a nice bold Bradley Hand as his handwriting font if you've got it on your device; otherwise, you should see whatever your default cursive font is.)

Chapter Text

Akechi's agent might have given up on getting him to record an insipid song about justice or manners or whatever was projected to sell, but there was no getting out of advertisements. Not just for products that were relevant to Akechi's celebrity persona, like sweets or study aids—his face was also appearing on ads for smart watches, curry roux blocks, and even a regional airline, despite Akechi never having boarded a plane in his life. He was mostly an accessory in that one, anyway, beneath a larger Morgause flying parallel to a jetliner.

Sometimes he wondered how much he was theoretically getting paid for all of this, but it wasn't as if it mattered. All negotiations were handled by his agent, and all payments went, presumably, directly into one of Shido's shell accounts.

At least they weren't not-paying him to be the face of another fire safety PSA.

Today's photoshoot reimagined the Detective Prince as a prop for displaying designer sunglasses, posing him outdoors in scenic Roppongi Hills in expensive and impractical variations on tracksuits. That sunglasses weren't part of his image seemed to be of no concern.

"Give us active but not sporty," he was told, while also being directed to continue looking "boldly pensive." An assistant pushed a pair of sunglasses up into his fringe like an awkward headband. The photographer unhelpfully reminded him that the mood of the shoot was "youthful and trendy."

During a lull in the artificial shutter noises, Akechi asked, "Would you perhaps like me to hold a ball of some sort?"

The photographer tutted. "I said not sporty. We don't have synergy with any athletic equipment brands."

This was probably for the best; had they handed Akechi a baseball, he would have struggled not to growl and gnash his teeth. Last Friday he tried to play off scoring fewer home runs than Amamiya as another case of him going easy on his junior, but Amamiya had responded with a pointed offer to bat left-handed. Nothing even popped up over Amamiya's head afterward as a consolation prize.

Yesterday's return to form at Penguin Sniper didn't result in any mysterious symbols, either, but it had felt good to lead Amamiya on with an intentionally botched shot before sinking three balls in a row, along with his hopes.

The creative team's debate over whether Akechi should try holding an unbranded water bottle was interrupted by Morgause mimicking a ringtone from the branches of a nearby tree.

"Excuse me," Akechi said, trying not to sound gleeful as he picked up his phone. "As I informed you earlier, I might be receiving an urgent call this afternoon. Police business."

He carried on an imaginary conversation while the crew bickered about whether they had enough usable shots to avoid having to do this all over again. Phone still tucked to his ear, he slipped behind the curtain of the makeshift changing area, escaped his uncomfortably snug athleisure situation, and hurried toward the station in his summer uniform.

Morgause descended on his shoulder as soon as he was out of sight of the shooting location. "They said they're not leaving until they secure a route to something. We'll have plenty of time to catch up to them."

Akechi secured his routes with brute force. Loki's rampant destruction drew most Palace rulers out to confront him in less than half an hour, and even the cowardly ones quickly ran out of places to hide. Surely the Phantom Thieves didn't have the strength or the stomach to do the same; they would spend hours sneaking around and solving all those little cognitive puzzles. Whatever they did to trigger a change of heart was surely a more delicate and time-consuming operation than triggering a mental shutdown, too.

Plenty of time. Akechi still vibrated with impatience on the train.

After finding a relatively quiet spot on Central Street to melt away from the crowd, Akechi scrolled through the Meta-Nav's search history. "Junya Kaneshiro, Shibuya, bank," Morgause read out loud, for no one's benefit, before hopping down from Akechi's shoulder. "We've roughed that guy's Shadow up before, right?"

"I've put the fear of his master back in him." Without leaving space for an argument, he tapped the screen and breathed through the transition to a darker, emptier city, awash in sickly green light. The air stank of ozone and burnt paper. An ATM with human limbs tottered out of an alley, smoking and twitching, before collapsing face-first on the pavement.

It took only a moment of glancing around for Akechi to remember Kaneshiro's gimmick. Being literally above the law was a common cognitive distortion for the rich and powerful; Kaneshiro's floating bank, like his entire criminal enterprise, was equal parts repugnant and banal.

With a squawk for attention, Morgause took flight behind him. "Up you go, kid."

Akechi nodded and raised his arms parallel to the ground. She surged forward and slammed her chest against his back, locking them together like magnets.

Anatomy distorted in ways that Akechi was glad he couldn't see: her legs lengthened around his waist, her wings along his arms, her remiges to his feet, and her neck over the top of his head, nestling her beak between the prongs of his helmet. He beat their feathered limbs against the malleable air until, with a hard flap, he was airborne.

When Akechi was fifteen, discovering this ability had been at once the most exciting and embarrassing moment of his life. He understood aerodynamics. He knew damn well that fusing feathers to a human being's arms and expecting powered flight was absurd. He knew about hollow bones and thick pectoral muscles and all the other essential adaptations his body lacked.

But the masses were ignorant enough to dream of flying like birds, and in the cognitive world, the laws of physics were no match for them. So Akechi flapped and soared and rolled, and as idiotic as it all was, it was exhilarating. There were no Shadows guarding the skies, only banknotes falling like dead leaves. Nothing would stop him if he wanted to find out whether Kaneshiro believed anything existed above him.

Nothing but the urgency behind his own purpose in coming here, anyway. Akechi hadn't gotten this far by indulging whims at the expense of duties. He allowed himself to overshoot the bank only so that he could spiral down on it.

Landings were smoother than they used to be but still awkward. Morgause detached to help him decelerate as soon as his heels struck the ground, but his clawed boots still gouged the tiles all the way across the courtyard to the entrance. When he threw out a hand to catch himself against the wall, he saw a mess of plywood panels and caution tape where the main door should have been.

"Pretty sure they got in over here," Morgause called, waving a wing from beside one of a pair of gaudy piggy bank statues. It was out of alignment with its counterpart, and overlooked an open hatch.

Better to follow their path than risk crossing it, Akechi decided, even though crawling through the narrow steel shaft in his mask and gauntlets created an auditory nightmare. Morgause followed, complaining that there wasn't quite enough room for her to walk upright and that, unlike Akechi, she didn't have the anatomy of a crawler. He kicked her for following too close and didn't pretend to feel sorry.

The shaft curved up into a hole that opened on a private corner of the bank's vast lobby. No sign of the Phantom Thieves when Akechi poked his head out, but the scarcity of Shadows on patrol made it clear that they'd been through.

Before he could ask Morgause to track them, her talons dug into his lower back. He jolted to his feet, hissing, and she hopped off when the area she was clinging to rose above floor level.

"You were blocking the exit," she said in response to his demand to know what the hell that was about.

The noise attracted company in the form of a guard-shaped Shadow. Akechi scarcely glanced at it before emptying the cognitive clip of his gun into it, letting its warbled cicada-shriek serve as confirmation of the kill before it even got a chance to transform. A heart like Kaneshiro's couldn't attract better.

"They're underground." Morgause swept a wing toward the floor. "Not all the way down yet, though. Actually, they're coming back up."

Sneaking around in Palaces wasn't Akechi's usual approach, but he was still an excellent prowler. He slinked into the shadow of a nearby wheeled privacy wall to wait. Morgause's coloration wasn't as conducive to hiding in the dark, but she was small enough even in her anthropomorphic form to tuck herself under a shelf supporting a payphone. A few minutes passed in intent silence.

"They're moving around one floor below us," Morgause said, rolling back out into the open. "Looking for something, probably. I don't think they're going any higher."

A trail of scattered coins and suspiciously Shadowless expanses led to an unlocked security door and a descending staircase. Akechi let Morgause take point; if the cat's senses were at all comparable to hers, he didn't want to risk detection. Even if the Phantom Thieves suspected that they weren't the only ones taking advantage of the Metaverse, there was no sense in confirming that for them.

One of Morgause's wings flared out in a signal to halt. Akechi pressed closer to the wall he had been skulking alongside. With patience and a little effort, he began to make out the sounds of footsteps and what might have been intended as whispers from around a corner up ahead.

Unsurprisingly, Sakamoto's voice was the first one to be loud enough for Akechi to pick out every word. "Seriously, man, there's nothing here. You sure you're sensin' something?"

"Of course I'm sure!" The cat's voice rose to a matching volume. "Just because Skull can't sense anything unless it falls on his head—"

"Keep it down." It took Akechi a moment to recognize Niijima's voice under an unfamiliar layer of confidence. "Joker, can your grappling hook get us up to that balcony? If we're not right on top of a Will Seed, maybe there's a Will Seed right on top of us."

Takamaki cheered. "Good thinking, Queen!"

The thwip noises that followed gave Akechi time to take out his pocket notebook and a pen. Under "Equipment," he added "grappling hook," and under "Codenames," he added, "Ryuji Sakamoto: Skull" and "Makoto Niijima: Queen," before filling in the blank he had left for their leader.

What kind of codename was "Joker," anyway?

And hadn't the cat called him that on the way to Penguin Sniper, too? Akechi had thought nothing of it at the time, when he had so many other conversational balls to juggle, but he supposed if anyone could get away with using Metaverse codenames outside the Metaverse, it was the creature least likely to be overheard. Did the cat even have a codename, or was that too ridiculous even for people who called each other things like "Skull"?

He tucked the notebook away when yelling began up on the balcony.

"There's a Take-Minakata up there," Morgause whispered. "They ran right into it."

Not a strong Shadow by any means, but sturdier than the weaklings in the lobby. Akechi peeked around the corner to look for a way up that wouldn't put him in the open, but the hallway was a well-lit dead end. Annoyingly, the balcony was also high enough that he couldn't see anything of the fight but splashes of magic.

The ceiling was high and dark, lined with barely visible rafters. Akechi backed away until Morgause flashed a large feather as a thumbs-up, prompting him to spread his arms. A quiet, efficient flight later, he scuttled like a spider along the rafters until he had a good view of the show.

From above, it was easy to track the movements of each fighter and pass judgment on their choices. Takamaki kept her distance, manifesting a Persona with ruffled skirts and fire skills; Sakamoto rushed in swinging what looked like a heavy pipe over his head; Kitagawa and the cat hung back in reserve, Kitagawa poised to leap into the fray and the cat loudly narrating everything that happened. (Takamaki was "Panther," he wrote down, and called her Persona "Carmen.")

That Amamiya was also fighting at close range came as a bit of a surprise, at least until Akechi saw the ease with which he danced in and out of danger, as well as the glint of the dagger in his hand. Not a strategic leader's weapon, but something fit for a showboating daredevil who liked to keep his enemies close. Obnoxiously, he kept slashing and stabbing and not summoning his Persona.

The figure keeping a distance between Takamaki and Sakamoto had to be Niijima, by process of elimination, even though everything about her was wrong.

"Queen" suggested that her costume would be fitting for a straitlaced scold of a student council president. Instead she looked like a thug from a post-apocalyptic movie, decked out in leather and spikes with a blocky iron mask. None of it made sense, but that was unmistakably Niijima's hair, and the voice that bellowed, "Johanna!" was the same one that apologized when Akechi poked at Niijima's weak points.

Was her Persona a fucking motorcycle? Did she just punch a Shadow in the face before running it over with a fucking motorcycle?

Sae had mentioned that she and her little sister both practiced aikido. Akechi did not, but he was reasonably certain that no style of aikido focused on vehicular homicide.

Morgause let out a quiet whistle. "Always the quiet ones, eh?"

Akechi shushed her and pressed himself down against the rafter, squeezing a centimeter closer to the action. Amamiya continued to be an unbearable tease about the shape of his soul.

No worse for the wear after being run over, the Take-Minakata roared back upright. Its head came down like a hammer on Sakamoto's and knocked him flat on his back. "Skull's in trouble!" the cat yowled. "Someone heal him!"

"On it," Amamiya said, voice lower and more forceful than Akechi had ever heard it. He sprang out of the way of another headbutt, grabbed the edge of his mask, and summoned what was unmistakably a High Pixie.

Akechi scarcely managed to snap his mouth shut against an incredulous shout. A High Pixie? How dare Amamiya's soul manifest as such generic garbage?

Morgause's wing patted his shoulder. "Keep it together, kid," she said, then hissed when Akechi shoved her away. "Hey!"

He glared at her, trying to control the volume of his voice by gritting his teeth. "Why is his Persona a goddamn trash Shadow?"

"Personas are Shadows. We've been over this." With a disdainful sniff, she added, "You should be glad the guy who's trying to blow up your life has such a shitty one."

Akechi had not come in second place at the batting cages to someone whose soul manifested as target practice. With a snarl, he went back to squinting at the battle for any sign that Amamiya's Persona was a fearsome creature in disguise. It giggled and cast Diarama.

As Sakamoto got back on his feet, Niijima spun on her Persona, firing off a frizzling spark of Frei, and shouted, "It's not weak to nuclear, either!"

"I'll try psychokinesis," Amamiya said, incorrectly. High Pixies only healed each other, tried to make you drowsy, blew pathetic little gusts of wind, and fell screaming when you shot them.

But when Amamiya removed his mask after ordering everyone to stand back, no High Pixie appeared. Instead a Leanan Sidhe came forth and sent a blast of psionic energy into the Take-Minakata's face, knocking it flat on its back.

The wooden beam cracked in Akechi's grasp. Luckily, the Phantom Thieves were busy unloading their guns like a firing squad, so loudly that they couldn't possibly have heard him.

Of all the possibilities for Amamiya's Persona, Akechi never would have guessed that he had two, and that both of them were identical to weak Shadows that roamed the Path of Kaitul. Akechi wanted to summon Loki and bring the roof down on Amamiya's infuriating head.

"Huh," said Morgause.

"Huh," Akechi mimicked under his breath, and got a faceful of feathers for it.

Below, the Phantom Thieves regrouped around the dissipating darkness that used to be their foe. If a Take-Minakata had given them this much trouble, Akechi would be able to wipe them all out without breaking a sweat, when the order inevitably came.

"Aha!" The cat waved his little scimitar at the far end of the walkway, where paper money and caution tape nearly obscured a closed door. "Told ya there was a Will Seed here!"

Kitagawa nodded. "Queen was correct; it was right on top of us all along."

Even from a distance, it was clear the cat's tail was bristling. "But I'm the one who—"

"Let it go, Mona," said Sakamoto, strolling past with his pipe slung over his shoulder like a baseball bat.

Of course. Akechi added "Mona: Mona" to his notes for completion's sake.

"There's a concentrated blob of Kaneshiro in there," Morgause said, following up with a little spitting noise. "No clue why they'd want that."

Who knew why they did anything, really. Akechi slinked along the rafters to watch them enter and exit the little room, then head toward the large open security door below.

As they passed through, he could just make out Sakamoto asking, "Hey, Joker, you still got that naked Yak lady?"

Niijima's sigh carried all the way up to the ceiling. "It's Yaksini."

The group moved out of earshot as Akechi froze in place. Amamiya couldn't possibly have three. And what did he mean by "still"?

Morgause shrugged at him before he could even ask. Nothing for it but to keep following.

The next area kept Akechi at a greater distance with brighter lights, lower ceilings, and wider open expanses, but he managed to wedge himself into a shadowy passage to watch the Phantom Thieves take down an Oni after Amamiya leapt grinning on the back of a guard-shaped Shadow and ripped its mask off to expose it for what it was. An interesting strategy, and one that granted them the element of surprise as long as Amamiya could pull it off.

Which he did, without exception, with the rest of the few Shadows patrolling the floor. He continued trotting out different Personas, too; by Akechi's count, his soul was split into nearly half a dozen pieces. His outfit didn't even change as he flowed between them, Nekomata to High Pixie to Orobas to Leanan Sidhe to Yaksini. His mask must have been swollen and creaking against his face.

Kitagawa's Persona dropped an Orthrus to its belly, and as expected, the thieves drew their guns on it. Less expected was Amamiya striding forward, gun still trained on the Shadow, and speaking in his low, commanding Joker voice. A conversation too quiet for Akechi to catch followed, ending with the Orthrus dissolving into light and surging into Amamiya's mask.

To Akechi's consternation, when Amamiya whipped his mask off during the next fight, an Orthrus manifested to do his bidding. Akechi grabbed Morgause by the beak, twisted her head to make eye contact, and mouthed, What the fuck.

Morgause indignantly fluffed up her feathers, then shrugged when Akechi let go.

So Amamiya's heart wasn't just a pile of shards—it was a pile of shards that he swept up from the floors of other people's distorted hearts. If Akechi's heart was malformed, then what kind of hideous miscreation was Amamiya's?

At the end of a long hall, Kaneshiro's Shadow appeared just long enough to sic three meatier foes on the intruders before fleeing via the nearby glass elevator. That it left the safety of its vault at all indicated that it correctly judged the Phantom Thieves to be far less of a threat than Akechi.

The subsequent fight dragged on tediously as Akechi fleshed out his notes. With the way Amamiya cycled through Personas to block attacks and strike weaknesses, his teammates seemed superfluous, if not detrimental, to his progress. The only time he didn't switch Personas fast enough to avoid getting knocked on his ass was when he was distracted by the Sui-Ki exploiting Takamaki's weakness to ice. So why bother with them at all? What was he playing at?

Upon reaching the foregone conclusion of their victory, the Phantom Thieves called back the elevator and squeezed into it together. That was the only path down to the vault, Akechi remembered. Last time, Loki had crashed through the glass shaft so that Akechi could use Morgause's wings to glide down over concentric rings of safe deposit boxes. That was out of the question now, of course, but so was riding down in that slow fishbowl of an elevator. The risk of being caught far outweighed the reward of seeing exactly what the thieves were securing their route to.

"I'd say we got what we came for." As if this were her call, Morgause fished a Goho-M out of a pouch on her belt. "Codenames, Personas, elemental affinities. Let's pick up 777 bento for dinner."

"We have instant noodles at home," Akechi said flatly, ignoring her hiss. "And I haven't got what I came for until I know how Amamiya is turning all those Shadows into Personas."

"Who cares?" Morgause's most finger-like feathers gestured with condescending emphasis: "You can break the chains on anyone's heart to make them go berserk. He can chain weak little stray Shadows to his heart to use as weak little Personas. It's obvious who got the better deal here."

The floor fell out from under Akechi's dissatisfaction, letting it tumble down into spite. "That's not the point. If he can do it, then so can I."

"Why would you even want to?"

Direct access to different elemental attacks would be a damn sight more convenient than having Morgause carry around those elemental bombs that Shadows sometimes dropped. Even though Akechi seldom reached into the corner of his psyche that held Robin Hood, being able to resist and deal bless damage had saved his life more than once. Even trash had its uses.

"If I can acquire weak ones," he reasoned, "then I should be able to acquire the ones that put up a decent fight, too. Did you catch what Amamiya said to that Orthrus?"

After a disapproving pause, Morgause said, "It asked weird questions, he gave weird answers, and then at the end it remembered it was an Orthrus and didn't belong here. Something about coming from the sea of human souls." She paused again. "Lot of effort for something Loki could kill with a sneeze."

"Loki doesn't sneeze." This didn't feel like a particularly effective comeback, even as Akechi was saying it, but it made Morgause sigh and put away the Goho-M.

The first Shadows they came across were all the way back in the lobby, by which point Akechi's body was thrumming with anticipation. The one patrolling alone in a corner was surrounded by ample hiding places. Easy prey.

Leaping on the Shadow's back was simple enough, but it started thrashing before Akechi got a grip on its mask, and the blades of his gauntlets sliced deep before he could stop himself. He hit the floor ass-first as the Shadow's substance scattered.

"Don't," he said, before Morgause could say anything.

He kept a calculating eye on the mask of the next Shadow, ensuring that his fingers seized it in the same instant his legs hit its back. Ripping the mask away felt like ripping an adhesive bandage from his skin, but with the rush of his own pain replaced by the rush of a struggling victim. He held fast until the Shadow began to distort in his grasp, then leapt back out of melee range.

For his trouble, he got a High Pixie. He had to start somewhere, he supposed.

Bullets took them out fast but risked killing them in a single shot, so he aimed wide enough to graze the Shadow instead of putting a hole in it. With a shriek, it fell prone.

Akechi took a step forward, brandishing his gun, and took a breath to speak. The Shadow beat him to it with a cry of, "Wait, please! Can't we talk about this?"

Out of habit, Akechi suppressed the nasty grin he felt tugging at his mouth before remembering that there was no need to. "Well," he drawled, "that depends on what you can offer me in exchange for your life."

"I have money! How about some of that?"

Akechi sneered. "I don't want your pocket change. If you want to live, become my Persona."

"What? Ew." Umbrage displaced the fear in the High Pixie's expression. "I don't want to be part of your heart."

The skin under Akechi's left eye twitched. "Your counterpart was more than happy to enter the heart of that showboating thief in the black coat."

"Mmm-hmm, I'm a little jealous." The High Pixie smiled slyly and fluttered its wings. "Isn't he stylish and charming?"

If that was all it took, Akechi would have twice as many Personas as Amamiya in no time. Keeping his gun trained on the Shadow, he pushed his mask up and tossed his head to shake his fringe loose. With the smile that had garnered him the most praise at the photoshoot, he said with the Detective Prince's lilt, "If it's style and charm you want, I can assure you that I have more of both to offer."

The High Pixie's nose wrinkled. "Don't make that creepy face at me!"

"Stop flirting," Morgause hissed, batting a wing against Akechi's leg. "You suck at it."

"I wasn't—shut up." Akechi snapped off a low sideways kick, eliciting an angry squawk, and ground his teeth together. Charming a Shadow couldn't be all that difficult, if that amateur Amamiya could do it.

Akechi forced himself to sound gentle and patient: "Perhaps you've forgotten, but you came from the sea of human souls. Your true name is High Pixie."

The Shadow huffed up at him, as if it weren't a twitch away from being obliterated. "Yeah, obviously. Do you think that calling me by my name will make me want to become part of you? I'm not some dewy little nymph in the center of the swarm, you know."

Something cracked inside Akechi, expelling a harsh breath through his nose. "What the hell makes his heart any better than mine?"

"Good manners, for a start." The High Pixie had the audacity to look impatient. "Will you just leave me alone already? I'll give you a Life Stone."

With a shriek, Akechi blasted the Shadow into oily vapor.

After a moment of silence, during which Akechi's chest heaved with the force of his breaths, Morgause said, "Maybe that would work better in a Palace where you haven't happened to the Shadows before."

Akechi woke up on Sunday still seething about Amamiya's stable of Personas, and his mood was not improved when his morning bike ride was interrupted by a message from his agent informing him that he was expected back in Roppongi Hills by 11:00 to provide an active-but-not-sporty, boldly pensive, youthful, and trendy backdrop for more sunglasses.

"Keep an eye on Shibuya," he told Morgause on his way out the door. "Find me immediately if Kaneshiro receives a calling card."

She huffed at him. "All of Shibuya, sure. I get to pick dinner tonight."

Without committing, Akechi pulled the door shut behind him.

Scrolling through his notifications on his phone didn't usefully distract him on the train ride. An anonymous user was determined to sneak an obscene comment about an éclair past his food blog's filters, a search alert presented fresh speculation about Okumura's political ambitions, and his calendar informed him that the history essay he'd scarcely begun was due tomorrow. Ultimately, what was any of that going to matter?

Much more distracting was his chat history with Amamiya, whose last message had been plausibly deniable bastardry regarding his prowess in swinging a stupid wooden bat at a stupid little ball. Amamiya's inexplicable powers of Persona acquisition were more likely to matter than anything else vying for Akechi's attention at the moment, anyway.

So where to begin?

He couldn't directly ask what the hell was wrong with Amamiya's heart. This was the sort of information he would have to gather obliquely, by peeking through the gaps every time Amamiya was foolish enough to let down his guard. Reciprocal vulnerability—or rather, the illusion of it—would be key.

Equally key would be keeping Amamiya on Akechi's turf.

| ||Sunday, Jun 269:5595% 🔋
Ren Amamiya
Akechi:

Are you free this evening? There's somewhere I'd like to visit with you, if you're open to trying it.

Ren:

So ~mysterious~

If I didn't know better

I'd think you were trying to lure me into something

Akechi:Would you, now?

It's nothing shady, of course. I'm simply being discreet about a venue that I consider a refuge of sorts.

Of course, you're under no obligation to indulge me.

Ren:

Don't get ahead of yourself Mr Detective

I didn't say no

Akechi:Well, if you decide to say yes, I'll be waiting outside Penguin Sniper at 7:00pm.

Ren:

What a coincidence

I'll be there at the same time

The photoshoot ran absurdly long, to the point that Akechi was minutes away from faking another emergency to get back to Kichijoji on time. As it was, he rebutted the first threatening mention of "Golden Hour" with a reminder that he was a student who had homework. By the time he got to Penguin Sniper, he scarcely had time to look like he'd been waiting.

He heard the cat mutter, "He better not take you anywhere fishy," before he heard Amamiya's "Hey."

Looking up from his phone's lock screen, Akechi beamed. "Good evening. Shall we get going?"

Amamiya nodded, falling into a matching stride as Akechi started walking. "Still not going to tell me where?"

Akechi turned to flash him a smile with just a tiny glimpse of teeth. "What fun would that be?"

"This is already fishy," the cat whined. Amamiya scratched behind his ears, to his obvious and immediate displeasure.

As if just noticing the relative peace and quiet, Amamiya asked, "Where's Justice?"

"Off stretching his wings." The Phantom Thieves couldn't possibly have the resources to track down Kaneshiro's home address, so it was a safe bet that any calling card would be distributed in a place they knew Kaneshiro had eyes. Morgause was probably watching the coin lockers he used as drop points. "Even the best of friends benefit from spending time apart, wouldn't you agree?"

Amamiya responded with a noncommittal hum.

A familiar cadence of whispering rose behind Akechi, interspersed with giggles. He picked up his pace and was pleased when Amamiya matched him.

An ominous "Is that Akechi-kun?" carried around the corner he had just taken, so Akechi sped up again and overshot his destination. A quick lap past the fancy croquettes stall, he told himself, and he could lose his pursuers taking a circuitous route through the narrow alleys.

"This is fishier," the cat yowled. Amamiya made a shushing noise and weaved after Akechi through the crowds spilling out from the close-packed standing bars. If the cat had further complaints, they were drowned out by the cacophony of competing conversations.

When Akechi exited the gauntlet near his destination, there was no sign of anything like a throng of fans, and it was almost quiet enough for him to hear himself think.

"Here we are," he said pleasantly. "No animals allowed inside, I'm afraid."

Predictably, the cat grumbled his way out of the bag. Amamiya glanced from the signage to the specials board to the steps leading down out of the twilight, then asked, "What's a Jazz Jin?"

"It's a jazz club. I've heard some excellent performers here, and the owner excels at creating a relaxing environment."

"Sounds like my kind of place," Amamiya said, as if he hadn't lived his entire life in a podunk city without a single jazz club in it. (Akechi had checked.) He gestured graciously toward the stairwell. "After you."

Muhen waved off the attempt to pay Amamiya's cover charge with the assertion that any friend of Akechi's could enjoy their first visit on the house. Inexplicably flustered, Akechi autopiloted to his usual table before considering whether he actually wanted to share it. Too late by then to make sitting anywhere else look natural, so he took his usual seat and set his briefcase in the chair to his right to exert some control over Amamiya's position.

"I didn't realize that was Muhen's policy," Akechi said as Amamiya predictably sat at his left, rather than across from him like a normal person. "I've never brought anyone here with me before."

"I'm flattered to be your first." With a crooked smile, Amamiya began to look around, pausing as his gaze landed on the piano and its talented but unexceptional player for the evening, then on the couple sitting close together at a nearby table, and then on the bar, where Muhen was handing a middle-aged woman something with a tiny umbrella in it.

Akechi caught Muhen's eye and beckoned. As they waited, he said, "There's quite a variety of nonalcoholic cocktails available. Would you care for one?"

Amamiya nodded. "I'll take anything with an umbrella."

Of course he would.

Paying for both drinks felt like saving face, at least a little. Once their umbrella-garnished drinks arrived, they chatted about the music being played and jazz music in general, at once a thrilling opportunity for Akechi to show off how much he knew and a trap to keep Akechi monologuing instead of prying.

So he teed up a shift in topic: "That's why I try to come here at least once a week to unwind. It's good to take a break every now and then from my responsibilities at school and work. Do you have anywhere like that, Amamiya-kun? Somewhere you'd consider a refuge?"

Amamiya eyed Akechi silently, lips around his straw. He swallowed and pulled off with a quiet pop before saying, "Call me Ren."

The illusion of reciprocal vulnerability. "If you like," Akechi replied, but every soft wet organ in his body recoiled at the prospect of returning the gesture. "Goro" was a name for something ignorant and pathetic, a child who thought being born in freefall meant he would grow wings.

The silence dragged on for several full seconds before Amamiya accepted it as an answer to his unspoken question. Before Ren accepted it, Akechi corrected himself. Keeping one name in his head and another on his lips was difficult enough with Morgause.

Absently rocking his little umbrella back and forth with his fingertip, Ren said, "There's a little café in Yongen-Jaya I spend a lot of time at. It's near those batting cages we went to." He paused again, as if hoping to get a rise out of Akechi over the mention. "I live there, actually."

"How intriguing." Akechi leaned forward with the curiosity of someone who had never abused his access to police databases. "How did you come to live in a café, of all places?"

Akechi knew the official story: a soon-to-be second-year high school student in Shizuoka assaulted an innocent man in the street, a crime for which he was kicked out of his school and placed on a year's probation, which he elected to serve in Tokyo. The story didn't hold together under scrutiny—the culprit had neither a motive nor a history of violence, and the victim's name was kept out of both the press, which was normal, and the legal proceedings, which was not—but greater miscarriages of justice took place every day, many of them by Akechi's hand.

He wasn't going to think about the prosecutor's office seeking the death penalty for the unlucky man whose heart had longed to burn down a factory. Instead he leaned in to listen.

"Long story short," Ren said, still playing with the umbrella, "I'm here on probation. My old school kicked me out, and Shujin was the only school that would let me transfer. My parents know a guy who knows the guy who agreed to take me in for the year."

"The café owner, I presume. And you live in the café?"

"In the attic over it, yeah."

Maybe one of Akechi's relatives would have kept him if they'd had an attic to stick him in. He still would have been a drain on their resources, of course, but they might have been less resentful of the space he took up. Doubly so if the attic wasn't in their home.

But that wasn't important, beyond the knowledge Akechi tucked away that Ren's mailing address wasn't where he slept at night. "I can't help but notice you glossed over how you ended up on probation."

"Don't you already know that from investigating what happened with Kamoshida?"

Sharp. Akechi smiled invitingly and said, "I don't know your side of the story."

After a moment of calculating silence, Ren said, "I stepped in when I saw a drunk man harassing a woman. He fell over and told the cops I hit him, and the woman backed him up. No one believed me, so boom. Assault conviction."

No matter how much he was lying to make himself look better, he was probably lying less than the court record. "If I were you," Akechi said, "I imagine I'd be quite bitter about my situation. No wonder you have so little faith in the police. You can't unsee what you glimpsed behind the curtain of their justice."

Ren raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you part of the police?"

With a laugh that might have been a little too scathing, Akechi replied, "Not at all. I'm a consultant on cases they can't manage to solve on their own, and they're not terribly fond of a high-schooler showing them up."

"Are they jealous you're on TV, too?"

The ones who gave Akechi the most shit about his interviews were also the ones most likely to melt into sweaty little mumbles under a spotlight. "They wouldn't be if they knew how much pressure comes with being a public figure. If public opinion turns against you for any reason, no matter how unfairly, everything the masses once admired about you ceases to matter." Akechi moved to tip the vulnerability scale the other way: "As you've experienced yourself, on a much smaller scale."

Ren flicked it right back. "If you hate it so much, why not quit?"

"I hope I haven't given you the impression that I resent my popularity." Akechi replied, slipping into a camera-ready smile. "It has its challenges, yes, but knowing what a positive impact I have on my fans makes it all worthwhile."

Ren coughed into his fist. "Suuure."

"I'm sorry, what are you implying?"

"I watched you literally run away from your fans on the way here."

There was no playing that off as anything else. After a moment's consideration, Akechi conceded, "I suppose I do prefer my fans in the abstract."

"So what does make it worthwhile for you?"

Akechi kept a document on his phone compiling positive-but-not-creepy comments about himself, or at least about the Detective Prince, including an entire editorial praising him as the standard to which all of Japan's youth should aspire. Morgause mocked his collection of physical newspaper clippings, but he could copy and paste in peace on his phone whenever she wasn't around.

"It's nice to be recognized for my accomplishments," he said, finger back onto the scale. "No matter how much you believe in your work, it's demoralizing never to receive public recognition for it, wouldn't you agree?"

Ren shrugged. "That's what secret identities are for. All the glory, none of the stalking."

The most annoying part, Akechi thought, was that he probably believed what he was saying. "A secret identity can't hold forever against avid fans and detractors, you know. Even if it could, sooner or later someone else would take credit for your work and snatch that glory right out from under your nose." Akechi plucked his own little umbrella out of his drink for emphasis. "Unless you're a superhero in a story written for children."

"I'll keep that in mind if I ever take up superheroing," Ren replied lightly, as if he hadn't spent yesterday afternoon running around in a mask and costume and answering to Joker, "because if I'm in a story, it's for ages seventeen and up." He winked before adding, "Guess I'll have to find another way to make the world a better place."

In Akechi's mind's eye, Ren's expression distorted with despair as Akechi dragged him, bound and bruised and unmasked, into the pitiless lighting for a mugshot. "I recommend a job in sanitation," Akechi said, showing perhaps a few too many teeth. "No one will even make eye contact with you while you clean up after them."

Ren only broadened his grin. "I wouldn't mind getting paid to snoop through your trash."

Akechi was careful not to react to the gauzy apparition that appeared over Ren's head: a blue field again, enclosing the suggestion of a human form with something flowing between its oddly shaped hands. Perhaps it was holding a pair of cups? Once again there was floating text in the Latin alphabet, this time spelling out "XIV."

In the space of the blink during which it vanished, Akechi made the connection: not the Latin alphabet, but Roman numerals. Two weeks ago, it hadn't been "X" as in unknown or incorrect or a marker on a map, but as in ten.

Two numbers, ten and fourteen. Two symbols, a wheel and someone pouring a liquid from one cup into another. Two blue rectangular backdrops. He had seen something like them before, during one of Good Morning Japan's softcore occult nonsense segments.

Two cards.

The part of Akechi's brain that wasn't furiously spinning in place prodded the conversation back down an easy, worn path by commenting on the recording Muhen had just put on to cover the piano player's break. Ren seemed content enough with the change in pace, and at one point absently stuck the end of his little umbrella through the left hinge of his glasses. Akechi didn't point it out in hopes he would forget it was there.

Ren's phone chirped an alarm at 9:00pm. "Gotta be home by 10:00," he said, leaving Akechi to assume his curfew was at the behest of either his temporary guardian or, if Mona was anything like Morgause, his cat. Walking him to the station would have been polite, but would also have meant giving up precious time with a guaranteed lack of nosy birds, so Akechi settled for walking him to the door.

Regrettably, Ren removed the umbrella on his way up the stairs, but Akechi had far more pressing concerns. He beelined back to his table, took out his phone, and searched for cards traditionally used for divination. In short order he had skimmed an overview of the tarot and confirmed that Amamiya was making him hallucinate the Major Arcana, specifically the Wheel of Fortune and Temperance.

Destiny, cycles, and turning points. Balance, moderation, and patience. Vague, vacuous bullshit. What did any of this have to do with the Metaverse? Could he unlock some sort of power over Ren by drawing out all twenty-two Major Arcana?

And how literal was the iconography? Was it merely coincidence that he saw a wheel in a place full of rolling balls and round dartboards, then two cups in a place that served fancy drinks? Akechi had yet to find any Major Arcana card artwork that mapped neatly to a batting cage, so perhaps he was on to something. Perhaps he could lure Ren and his small animal to the edge of a cliff, as a test.

Still wrapped up in his thoughts, he jolted more than he should have when he reached street level and Morgause landed on him. With palpable disapproval, she said, "You didn't mention you were going to hang out with the Phantom Thieves' leader again."

"You're not my calendar."

She yanked his hair with her beak, hard enough to make him grunt. "Don't come crying to me when you need a nap after summoning Loki twice."

"I'm gathering valuable intel," Akechi said under his breath, then paused to beam at a staring passerby who looked to be on the verge of recognizing him. He took the next turn down a narrow side street. Best to get in the habit of taking new and inefficient routes back to his apartment, he decided, to at least discourage stalkers. When the coast was clear, he continued, "And he's becoming obsessed with me. He'll be eating out of my hand when the time comes for me to snap his neck."

"Or we could squash him and his entire team like bugs in the Metaverse. You already have all the intel you need for that."

"Shido wants them alive. For now." This was not strictly accurate; Shido just didn't want Akechi to take them out yet, either because he was mulling over how to turn them into grist for the mill of his campaign or because he considered it a waste of resources when they were likely enough to get themselves killed.

Shido would have been a fool to assume the latter. It was unthinkable that the dreck in Kaneshiro's Palace could take down someone who weaponized having shrapnel in place of a heart.

Morgause huffed but didn't bite, so Akechi added, "In any case, it's your turn to stalk him now."

The blue around Morgause's visible eye wrinkled into a squint. "What could you possibly still need to know about this guy?"

"This isn't just about him. If you tail him instead of hanging around Shibuya all day, you'll still know when they send the calling card, and you might find out something useful, like where they're acquiring weapons."

"'Useful,'" Morgause mimicked, puffing up her feathers. "I'll only do it if I get to pick dinner until the calling card goes out."

A new layer of headache began to throb behind Akechi's forehead. "What does that matter to you? You don't even have to eat."

"I like to eat, and you're bad at feeding yourself. Get snippy and it's gonna be sunflower seeds every night."

Rolling his eyes, Akechi rounded the corner of a quiet residential street, almost devoid of other pedestrians. Probably safe now to head toward home. By the light of his phone screen, he checked a detail in his pocket notebook before saying, "Fine. While he's at school tomorrow, scope out the area in Yongen-Jaya near Café Leblanc. That's where he's living instead of his guardian's house. I want to know the places he frequents and any adults who might be aiding and abetting the Phantom Thieves."

Morgause tilted her head to a deeply skeptical angle before straightening up with a trill. "Fine," she said, then dug her talons into Akechi's skin and twisted hard to the right.

As he bit back a yelp, he saw the glow of a 777 storefront across the street. His headache intensified. "For fuck's sake."

Morgause raised her crest and spread her wings triumphantly. "We're getting bento."

PT Codenames


Ren Amamiya

: Joker

Ryuji Sakamoto

: Skull

Ann Takamaki

: Panther

Unknown member: Fox
Yusuke Kitagawa

: Fox

Makoto Niijima

: Queen

Mona

: Mona

Last updated:

05/28

06/25

PT Personas


Ren Amamiya

High Pixie (???)

BULLSHIT


Ryuji Sakamoto

Captin Kidd

+Elec/-Wind


Ann Takamaki

Carmen

+Fire/-Ice


Yusuke Kitagawa

Goemon

+Ice/-Fire


Makoto Niijima

J

Y

ohanna

+Nuke/-Psy


Mona

Zorro

+Wind/-Elec


Ren Amamiya

Whatever else he can get his grubby little hands on, apparently

Confirmed: High Pixie, Leanan Sidhe, Yaksini, Nekomata, Orobas, Orthrus


Last updated: 06/25


* = blackmail potential

Ren Amamiya Bio


DOB

04/09/1999


School

Shujin Academy, Aoyama-Itchome, Minato

Clubs

None

Grades

Middling


Current residence

Café Leblanc (attic), Yongen-Jaya, Setagaya


Permanent residence

Bumfuck Nowhere, Kosai, Shizuoka


Known workplaces

Rafflesia (Shibuya Underground Mall)

777 (Central Street, Shibuya)

Ore no Beko (Central Street, Shibuya)

Crossroads (Red Light District, Shinjuku) (drag bar?) *


Last updated:

06/29

07/01


* = blackmail potential

Aiders & Abetters


Metaverse guide

Mona (cat)

Transforms into bus into the Metaverse

Motives?

Can hear Morgause?


Temporary guardian

Sojiro Sakura (no criminal record) (relation?)


Source of model weapons

Untouchable (Central Street, Shibuya)

Munehisa Iwai (yakuza?) *


Source of medical supplies

Takemi Medical Clinic (Yongen-Jaya)

Dr. Tae Takemi (shady, drugs?) *


Maid?

Does his laundry in full costume *


Fortune teller?

Red Light District, Shinjuku

Large sum of cash exchanged for white substance (drugs?) *


Last updated:

05/28

06/09


06/30

What should have been a straightforward Call of Chaos job after Friday's filming became a tremendous pain in the ass when the victim managed to trash a government records room without badging in or getting caught on any of the security cameras. Only the uncanny insight of the Detective Prince could crack that case, so Akechi spent most of Sunday trying to create a chain of logical deductions that didn't contain more than one link of Sae-baiting "detective's intuition." Morgause made him go for a walk after his frustration nearly made him punch a hole in the wall.

In the end he had to triage his homework, finishing what was due in his Monday morning classes and saving what was due in the afternoon to race through over lunch. To avoid the students who clustered around his desk the moment the bell rang, he excused himself, power-walked to the nearest men's room, and locked himself in a stall to solve math problems with one hand and eat an apple with the other.

His phone buzzed as he limped toward the minimum character count for his literature essay.

| ||Monday, Jul 412:4572% 🔋
Ren Amamiya
Ren:

Hey

Any chance you're free after school

Sorry it's short notice

I can't hang out for long either

I'm not really selling this am I

Akechi:I'd recommend leaning into the element of intrigue. What's so urgent that you're messaging me about it in what I presume is the middle of one of your classes?

Ren:

Nice try

Gotta meet up with me to find out

Akechi:That's the spirit. Where are you proposing we meet?

Ren:

Shibuya

By that big crepes stand on Central Street

Million Sweets I think

Akechi:I'll do you the favor of assuming that your emergency isn't crepes-related and head there as soon as my own classes end.

Ren:

Assume away

My lips are sealed

My thumbs too

It didn't occur to Akechi until he had already exited Shibuya Station that assigning Morgause to tail Ren meant that she would crash any conversation they had in public, and Million Sweets was nothing if not public. This was what he got, he supposed, for splitting his attention so many ways at once. This and a literature essay he would have been embarrassed to hand in if he hadn't already shifted what little focus he had for school toward making sure he aced his exams next week.

Even if Morgause was inevitable, fan interactions didn't have to be. The hushed giggling outside a Big Bang Burger probably wasn't about him, but Akechi still kept the emblem on his briefcase facing inward as he hurried across the street toward the beacon of Ren's messy hair.

Ren spotted him immediately, because Ren, unlike most people, paid attention. With a friendly wave, Ren led him off to the side of the crepe stand, out of the throng of customers and into a slice of obscuring shade.

His bag wasn't wiggling or whining, so Akechi asked, "Where's your cat?"

"I told Mona I had to step out for a bit. Even the best of friends need to spend time apart, right?"

As usual, Ren's poker face was good but not perfect. Akechi smiled at the sharp angles poking through. "How did he take it?"

"He said, 'Meow-meow mrrrp.' He'll get over it." Ren paused a moment before adding, "No Justice, either?"

"Looks like it's just the two of us today." Akechi hoped this remained true; so far, no one in the crowd was staring too intently at him. "Now, then, I believe there was some pressing matter to attend to?"

"Yeah, about that." Ren scratched the back of his neck. "I'm having a difference of opinion with someone."

"Oh?" Akechi raised his hand to his chin, not entirely performatively. "Who and what opinion?"

"That's a secret. It's several someones, anyway. And several opinions."

"I could play this game all afternoon," Akechi drawled, letting only a fraction of his irritation slip through, "but aren't you on something of a tight schedule?"

Ren let out a small laugh. "Sorry, got stuck in intrigue mode. I was out with a friend yesterday, and I stopped to look at this crepes stand, and he told me I'm not a crepes person."

Had it been the cat? Akechi very much hoped it had been the cat. "Are you a crepes person?"

"I dunno, I've never had one. So how would he know?"

A quick scan of the crowd confirmed there was still no imminent threat of fan interactions, though a few glances lingered too long on Akechi. "And thus you've called me out here to assist in the urgent matter of ascertaining whether you're a crepes person."

"Exactly."

Absolute idiocy. But Morgause's insistence that Akechi didn't really enjoy nineteenth-century Western philosophy had filled his bookshelf with spite and dialectics, so he said, "Why not? Let's order some."

Ren beamed and reached into his bag. "Cool. If I don't have to bribe you, then this's just a gift."

Before Akechi could react, he had a cheap glasses case pressed into his hands. Inside was a pair of thick plastic frames, unflatteringly large and cartoonishly round, encircling what Akechi assumed were non-prescription lenses.

"Fan-repellant," Ren said. "Put those on and nobody will look twice at you."

A little too snidely, Akechi replied, "I suppose you'd be the expert on that." He put the glasses on to smooth things over, whereupon Ren gave him an appraising look, leaned closer, and, to Akechi's paralyzing horror, worked both hands into Akechi's hair as if he were petting a dog. The inside of his wrist rubbed maddeningly against the top of Akechi's ear.

By the time Akechi had the wherewithal to pull away, Ren was already dropping his arms back to his sides and saying, "Perfect. Crepes are on me."

"Repellant!" Morgause squawked from somewhere above. Her talons snagged into Akechi's shirt and jolted his stalled-out brain.

The bird on his shoulder was a giveaway—he couldn't just stand there like a slack-jawed oaf—someone was bound to recognize—

No one was looking at him at all, he realized. Eyes hadn't slid off him so readily since he was small and unwanted, a problem no one wanted to end up responsible for solving. He made eye contact with a young woman waiting in line for crepes and watched her gaze dart to the menu.

"Hey, Justice," Ren said with a little wave. "It's been a while."

Morgause fluffed her crest up and squawked, "Hey! Justice!"

What was the subtext there, Akechi wondered. Had Ren noticed Morgause tailing him over the last week? Aloud Akechi said, "He comes and goes as he pleases. Much like your cat, I'm sure."

"Sure." Ren was already moving toward the front of the crepes stand, trusting Akechi to follow. Glowering at Morgause, Akechi obliged. She whistled a gratingly jaunty tune.

Ren studied the menu as the queue bore them briskly forward. "Ann said she always gets two, so I guess that's normal."

Akechi eyed the oversized, stuffed-to-bursting wraps in the hands of the departing customers ahead of them. Photogenic fodder for the food blog, if nothing else. "I wouldn't be so quick to assume."

"Only one way to find out. One strawberry and one blueberry, please." Ren turned to Akechi and asked, "Wanna get the chocolate banana so we have the full seasonal set?"

The chocolate banana crepe could not make an appearance on Akechi's food blog, not after the comment moderation nightmare that followed his selfie with a banana split. That the bananas were sliced was not sufficient mitigation. "Why don't you get the banana," he said, "and I'll get the strawberry?"

Ren turned back to the vendor. "Actually, just give me one of each and we'll figure it out."

"And yet you were such a bitch about getting a fruit sandwich last night," Morgause muttered. Akechi flicked a fingernail against what he knew to be the most sensitive part of her foot and was rewarded with a hiss.

As they waited for their order, Ren said, "Can cockatoos eat crepes?"

Akechi shrugged. "I suppose we'll find out when he inevitably steals a bite."

"I wouldn't have made you buy that fruit sandwich if you told me we'd be getting crepes today," Morgause said, craning her neck to get a better look at the construction process behind the counter. "That's what you get for not keeping me in the loop."

Taking the strawberry crepe and letting Ren carry the other two, Akechi navigated away from the crepes crowd to the first alley that didn't have coin lockers or shady loiterers. Nowhere to sit, but there weren't many people passing through, and the lighting was decent. Weren't crepes meant to be eaten on one's feet, anyway?

Ren regarded his two crepes with the same expression he probably wore under his Joker mask while picking which patrolling Shadow to pounce on. "Here we go," he said before biting into the chocolate banana one. A daub of whipped cream stuck to his nose.

Akechi stared at it for a normal amount of time to gloat over Ren's graceless opening move, then raised his own crepe to take a smaller, neater bite. The cloying smell didn't prepare him for the taste of a thin sugary pancake spiraling around sugary cream studded with sugary fruit and dripping with sugary syrup. One nibble was enough to make his teeth ache.

He forced himself to swallow and declared, "I'm not a crepes person."

"You haven't even tried the other two yet," Ren said around a mouthful of blueberry. "Let me try yours, too."

"Not yet." After shooing Morgause off him, Akechi took off his fake glasses, smoothed down his hair, and lit up with a smile for his phone camera. He angled the crepe to show off his proof of nibbling. With a little cropping and a filter or two, at least one of his shots would probably be decent enough to post.

As he put his phone away, Ren reached over with infuriating familiarity to muss his hair back up. Morgause made things worse by hopping up his arm with the glasses in her beak, then bonking him in the cheeks with them in a disingenuous effort to put them back on his face.

Akechi's attempt at a good-natured laugh came out strained. "Why don't we trade?" he said, grasping the glasses with one hand and pushing his crepe at Morgause with the other. She made a show of considering before shoving her beak into the cream to dig for strawberries.

Ren waved the blueberry crepe enticingly near her until she switched to attacking it. With a conspiratorial smile, he leaned unnecessarily close to sample the least messy side of Akechi's strawberry crepe.

"Oof, that's sweet," he said, raising his head with even more white on his nose. He maintained eye contact while adding, "Maybe a little too sweet."

Morgause squawked, muffled by whipped cream. "It's the blueberry that's too sweet. This syrup is awful."

"Then stop eating it," Akechi said to both of them.

"Way ahead of you. Hold still for a sec." Ren flicked his finger against the edge of Akechi's glasses and came away with a smear of cream, which he raised a hypocritical eyebrow at before putting his face back into the mound of chocolate and banana.

Scowling, Akechi took the glasses off to wipe them. He was a hand short to do it properly, so he surrendered his grip on the strawberry crepe to Morgause's grasping claws. Whatever mess she made of it would be her own damn fault.

As Ren forged ahead on his quest to finish at least one crepe, Akechi made notes for a future review on his phone, glad that he had a reference image for what the strawberry crepe had looked like before Morgause stuck her entire head in it. A note on the apparent popularity of the stand, a little praise for the swiftness of the service, a quick description to complement the photo, then end on something like, "With fresh flavors and generous portions, these crepes are sure to satisfy even the biggest sweet tooth." He could have written this shit in his sleep.

"So are any of those reviews honest?" Ren asked, much too close to Akechi's ear.

Akechi reflexively pressed his phone screen to his chest, even though Ren had no doubt gotten his fill of snooping over before speaking up. "They're honest enough," he said shortly, sidling to a comfortable distance. "The point isn't whether I personally enjoy any of the food I review."

Ren continued to be awfully nosy for someone whose nose still had cream on it. "Have you enjoyed any of it?"

"Like I said, that isn't the point."

"Well, if you get tired of pretending to like sweets, you can stop by this lovely little café in Yongen-Jaya that serves great curry."

Akechi slipped his phone back into his pocket to distract from the urge to clean Ren's stupid face. "Would this happen to be the lovely little café where you live?"

"Of course. I'm not shilling for the competition." Ren paused before adding, "It really is good, though. I have it for breakfast every morning."

Imagining Ren's guardian cooking for him each day before school made something sour rise in Akechi's throat, so he focused on the remains of the chocolate banana crepe in Ren's hand and changed the subject. "Looks like you've hit a wall there. What's the verdict?"

"I'd say I'm a half-a-crepe person, and I'm a little scared of Ann now." Ren stuffed his partially eaten crepes together and turned to the mess Morgause had left on the ground when she hopped away to groom herself. "How about you, Justice?"

Morgause raised her beak from her chest to squawk, "Half a crepe!"

Ren squinted as he knelt to investigate. "Picking out all the strawberries isn't really 'half.'"

"He repeats sounds without truly understanding them, remember?" Akechi said, with a meaningful glare at Morgause while Ren was engrossed in cleaning up after her. "You shouldn't expect to have a meaningful conversation with him."

"Agree to disagree. I think he's just bad at fractions." Ren stood up with a growing collection of partially eaten sweets and used napkins, which he more or less compressed into a single damp handful.

Before Akechi could point out that the nearest appropriate bin was probably in the nearby 777, Ren frowned, wiped his free hand on his pants, and slid his buzzing phone out of his pocket. Akechi caught the subtle compression of his lower lip between his teeth before he said, "Gotta run now, sorry. Thanks for hanging out with me."

"Thank you for the remarkably effective disguise," Akechi replied, to keep things even. Using the momentum to push off from the back foot he'd been on for too much of the conversation, Akechi caught Ren by the shoulder, told him to hold still, and rubbed his nose with a clean napkin.

Ren scrunched his nose and laughed when Akechi let him go. "Sorry, I'm kind of a mess today. See ya."

As he hurried off down Central Street, Morgause punctuated a particularly loud and unpleasant round of grooming noises by looking up and demanding, "What the hell was all that about?"

"Never mind that," Akechi said sharply. After making sure no one was approaching from the street, he added in a lower voice, "You're still supposed to be keeping tabs on him. They're obviously meeting up right now to send that calling card."

"That's why I'm giving it a minute before I head to their 'hideout.' He'd notice me if I followed him right after... whatever this was." She disdainfully waved a wing. "Seriously, what the hell was that?"

"I'm playing the long game." Without leaving room for followup questions, Akechi continued, "I'm going home to catch up on schoolwork. Don't let them out of your sight until you see a calling card delivered."

Morgause harrumphed, and before she took flight, she gave him a stern look. "You're getting another salad for dinner."

Mere minutes before the bedtime she so strictly imposed on Akechi, Morgause flew in through the open window and landed in the middle of his desk, sparing him further engagement with a poorly written study guide.

"You're late," he said dryly. "I was about to get away with fewer than eight hours of sleep tonight."

She smacked his hand with one of her wings. "Shut up. I'm on time and I was doing my job. It's not my fault Sakamoto and Niijima took so long scattering calling cards everywhere."

Pairing the brawn and the brains for a job that benefited from both—perhaps the Phantom Thieves were beginning to get their act together at last. "Everywhere?" Akechi asked, raising an eyebrow. "Surely not all of Shibuya."

"All over Central Street and around what must be one of Kaneshiro's clubs, smartass. They're going to change his heart tomorrow. Did you eat that salad?"

He had tied his hair back and put on the glasses an hour ago to hit up the nearest Greener Greens location, where no one had bothered him at all while he ordered a meal to go. "Check the trash if you need proof. I'm calling this in."

Because Morgause was Morgause, she flew over to the bin in the kitchen. Akechi forced his teeth to stop grinding as he pulled up Shido's contact.

On the ring before the call would have gone to voicemail, Shido answered. Muffled noises in the background suggested he was at a hostess bar, surrounded by smoke and sycophants and women being paid to simper at him on a Tuesday night.

"The Phantom Thieves will be hitting Kaneshiro tomorrow after school," Akechi said as soon as the one-sided pleasantries were out of the way. "Expect to see reports of calling cards littering Central Street on the morning news."

Shido let out a short, derisive laugh. "Getting quite bold now, aren't they? A taste of attention from the media must be going to their heads." The sound of ice clinking in a glass carried over the connection. "That greedy little man has his fingers in a lot of pies. It would be troublesome if he dropped the names of the bakeries."

The cooing and giggling in the background turned Akechi's stomach. He focused on the sight of the papers in front of him, the smells of open-air izakaya drifting in through his window, and the sounds of Morgause rooting around in the kitchen as he said, "Understood. I'll make sure there's nothing left of his heart for them to change."

"You'll wait for my order," Shido snapped. "Their success isn't a foregone conclusion, and I'm not slaughtering a cow while I can still squeeze milk out of it."

Akechi winced. "Are you certain, sir? I haven't seen any indication that they're likely to fail this time."

"I don't pay you to ask questions, boy."

Either Shido was expecting a payout in the next twenty-four hours and fully expected Kaneshiro to prioritize delivering it over every other use of his last day as a person with free will, or Shido was making a point of rejecting Akechi's analysis out of hand because he was still so annoyed by Fukuyama's death or the undignified Good Morning Japan segments or any of the times a target answered the Call of Chaos in a way he hadn't anticipated, as if Akechi had any goddamn control over other people's repressed desires.

No, he needed to focus. There was no point in arguing. He caught himself imagining perfume entwined with the smell of smoke rising from the street, so he reached over to close the window before saying, "Of course, sir. Standing by."

Shido grunted and ended the call.

The phantom scent of perfume still lingered in Akechi's nose and mouth. He tipped his head back and took deep breaths of the air in his apartment, trying to stave off one set of sensory memories without letting them be replaced by much more recent ones of sickly sweetness and warm skin against his ear.

The smell and weight of Morgause added themselves to the mix as she perched on his shoulder and said, "Shido better not take it out on you if this bites him in the ass."

Most likely Shido would change his mind in the morning and expect Akechi to skip school to beat the Phantom Thieves to the punch. If not, then, well. Surely the Shadow of a changed heart could be killed just like any other.

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

Shido didn't call before school, nor during school, even though Akechi took the risk of not silencing his phone during classes and spent his lunch lurking around the shoe lockers so that he could leave at a moment's notice. Shido didn't call after school, either, while Akechi spent hours pretending to study at a diner on Central Street.

The only notifications he received were from his agent, whose number he temporarily blocked after the third false alarm, and his food blog, specifically about the engagement spike on his hastily posted review of Million Sweets. He had been so fixated on making sure he didn't look unkempt in his selfie that he had missed Ren's fingers flashing a "V" in the background, and now speculation about the Detective Prince's "secret friend" ran rampant in the comments.

Akechi thought about deleting the post, and then the entire blog, and then throwing his phone into the sea. He disabled comments instead, as if that wouldn't just drive the shitshow to social media.

The sun set, and Shido still didn't call.

It was unthinkable that the Phantom Thieves had failed. Kaneshiro was a cowardly blowhard whose Shadow had sobbed for mercy the moment Loki grinned at it while it dangling it upside-down by the ankles. Even if changing a heart required forcibly subduing a Shadow, Kaneshiro's wasn't nearly a match for the thieves.

Perhaps they had rescheduled their mission. Perhaps Kaneshiro's heart had been changed hours ago, and Shido just hadn't noticed. Perhaps Shido had forgotten how phones worked.

Morgause was waiting for him outside when he finally left for Shibuya station. "He still hasn't called?" she asked, unnecessarily, as she took her usual perch on his shoulder. Akechi didn't bother replying. "Well, Kaneshiro isn't running around apologizing yet. Maybe they're still waiting for the calling card to lure his Shadow out of hiding so they can do whatever the hell it is they do to change hearts."

The crowds near the station were too thick to risk whispering, so Akechi only hummed. As he recalled from feverishly checking the news on his phone every few minutes, the text of the calling card included a line about taking Kaneshiro's "distorted desires." Madarame's had, as well. Was the distortion that powered a Palace a tangible thing that the Phantom Thieves ripped out of its Ruler? Perhaps the only difference between a change of heart and a lobotomy was whether the surgery was performed on flesh or Shadow.

Alone on the first leg of his commute back to Kichijoji, Akechi's brain spiraled through increasingly unlikely scenarios. Perhaps Kaneshiro's distortion had proven difficult to excise, and the thieves were stuck in his Palace until they found a way to carve it out without killing his Shadow. Perhaps they had sensed Akechi stalking them and spent weeks on a decoy mission to distract him from their real target. Perhaps Ren had gotten distracted at the worst possible moment, and now their corpses were buried in Kaneshiro's cognitive vault.

After making his transfer, Akechi gave up and took out his phone.

| ||Wednesday, Jul 620:5128% 🔋
Ren Amamiya
Akechi:

Not to pry, but are you doing all right? You took off in quite a hurry yesterday.

Ren:

Yeah

Just had plans

What about you

Akechi:I hope you don't think that one bite of a disgustingly sweet crepe would be enough to take me out. Justice seems no worse off, either.

Ren:

Good

Sorry I'm like half asleep

Busy day

Akechi:No need to apologize. Good night, Ren.

Ren:

Zzz

Perhaps Shido had been blackout drunk for the last twelve hours.

Akechi was sound asleep when his phone vibrated violently under his ear. Bzzt-bzzt-bzzt-bzzt-bzzt. A pause, and an earsplitting squawk. Bzzt-bzzt-bzzt-bzzt-bzzt.

Going to voicemail would infuriate Shido. Disoriented, pulse pounding, Akechi fumbled at the screen until the call connected.

"'m'llo," he croaked, hoping he sounded even slightly more coherent outside his own head. What the hell time was it? Was it even still Wednesday?

There was a pause, presumably during which Shido was deciding whether it was worth chastising Akechi for the greeting, before the clipped response: "Kaneshiro's in custody. Take him out."

Akechi suppressed a groan and put all his energy into articulating his words. "I'll do it first thing in the morning."

"You'll do it right now. I want him dead-eyed and drooling before they can get him into an interrogation room." When Akechi didn't immediately respond, Shido snarled, "What the hell are you waiting for?"

No doubt Shido's surveillance methods would tip him off if Akechi wasn't outside within the next five minutes. Akechi swallowed his rage and managed a neutral, "Right away, sir." At the sound of the connection ending, he hurled his phone at the wall.

Morgause hissed and swooped down to collect it. "Tell me again," she said, too loudly for the middle of the night, "why I can't scratch that asshole's eyes out."

"Because I need to see the look in them when I whisper the truth in his ear." Fleeting indulgence in that fantasy got Akechi to his feet, and he set off scavenging for casual clothing, a hair tie, and a face mask. He added the fake glasses from Ren as a finishing touch.

Morgause dropped his phone into his free hand. As Akechi took a moment to confirm that it was no longer Wednesday and the trains were no longer running, she perched on his shoulder and said, "You're calling in sick tomorrow so you can catch up on sleep."

An argument to have later, once Kaneshiro's Shadow was a dissipating smear on the floor of its own vault. Killing it would be satisfying, at least. There were far more deserving targets, but those in no way diminished how richly Kaneshiro deserved to be reduced to a hollow lump of flesh.

The risk of being recognized by a taxi driver was low, but not low enough to be worth taking. Supplies slung over his shoulder in a tote bag, Akechi descended as quietly as possible to the ground floor, retrieved his bike, and resentfully pedaled his way to Shibuya.

An hour later, the Meta-Nav was telling him for the third time that no candidates could be found under the name Junya Kaneshiro. Every attempt after the first had been a waste of time, but the cold dread clumping in Akechi's stomach compelled him to go for a fourth.

Morgause nipped his ear, not quite hard enough to break the skin. "Calm down, kid. His Shadow's in Mementos now. I think."

"You fucking think?" Akechi hissed, because if he focused his anger outward, it couldn't get tangled up in his frustration that he hadn't made such a minuscule leap of logic on his own. He took some satisfaction in Morgause's startled squawk as he hopped back on his bike and headed for the station.

Of course a Shadow that survived the collapse of its Palace would end up in Mementos. Where the hell else would it go?

Instead of concocting absurd scenarios in his head, Akechi could have been checking the Nav throughout the day to figure out when the Palace vanished. There was something wrong with him, lately. He needed to get his shit together when he wasn't busy navigating a crisis on three hours of sleep.

Crossing over to Mementos was exhausting. Akechi pushed on to the foot of the stairs, trying not to think about how each step dragged him deeper into the wee hours of Thursday, and asked without turning around, "Which area is he in?"

"Uh, hang on." Morgause was quiet for long enough that Akechi did turn, and the dread came back colder and heavier at the sight of her shifting her weight from foot to foot and flicking her head in different directions. She caught Akechi's gaze with one blue-ringed eye and said, "He's in here somewhere, just... deeper than we've ever been. Remember that last barrier?"

There was a wall at the bottom of Sheriruth, just like the ones that had blocked off previous areas before Akechi began making a name for himself. Engraved with the same strange shining geometric patterns, fused shut along the same seams. The path to Aiyatsbus had opened itself to him after he aced multiple prestigious high schools' entrance exams; Chemdah, after he clawed his way to the top of the class at the most prestigious of them; Kaitul, after he proved himself a killer whose services Shido could sell.

For a long time that had been enough, until a target out of reach inspired the creation of the Detective Prince. Becoming an official consultant for the police department got him into Akzeriyyuth, a few mentions in the news opened up Adyeshach, and his first appearance on Good Morning Japan was enough for Sheriruth.

Surely all the interviews Akechi had endured and all the products he had endorsed were enough to grant him even deeper passage into Mementos. They had to be. He couldn't leave until that barrier either opened of its own accord or lay in pieces at his feet.

Turning back to face the tracks, Akechi raised his arms and spread them out to his sides. "Well, what are you waiting for?"

Morgause surged against his back. Familiar exhilaration quickened his pulse as feathers encased his arms. The weight of her head on top of his helped tamp down the noise in his brain.

With how much energy this form demanded and how far down they had to go, Akechi needed to be efficient. Where he would have rather swooped and harried and rained shrieking death from above upon terrified Shadows, he flew high and straight, eyes forward. He could sate himself later, once "later" was secured.

His heels skidded over stone as he landed in front of the barrier. Morgause detached from him in what had to be a deeply visually upsetting process, then hopped forward to take a closer look.

After only a moment's hesitation, she said, "It won't open. I don't think this one even cares how famous you are."

Akechi sneered and drew his sword. "Then I'll break it."

"It won't break, either."

"Just you watch."

The impact of the first strike sent shockwaves up Akechi's left arm. He shook it out and tried again, only for the blade to rebound just as hard. And again, and again, until his arm was numb and trembling. Not even a scratch was left on the surface.

With a frustrated howl, Akechi ripped the mask off his face and threw Loki at the problem. Laevateinn slammed down in deafening crashes; Eigaon licked at the glow of the geometric patterns; Megidolaon engulfed the landing in blinding light. Gouges and scorch marks marred the floor. The barrier remained unaffected.

Firing his pistol into the intersection of three lines accomplished nothing.

"I'm telling you," Morgause said, voice rising over the noise of Akechi scrabbling at a seam with his claws and the hooked toes of his boots, "it won't budge. The sooner you stop beating your thick skull against it, the sooner we can start figuring out how to spin this to Shido."

Akechi made a sharp, deranged noise that wasn't quite a laugh. There would be no spinning it.

Morgause sighed. "You've already tried all Loki's skills. Get back." As he begrudgingly stood aside, she called out, "Tristan!"

A dissonant harp chord heralded a blast of wind magic that broke against the barrier. Akechi narrowed his eyes at the empty suit of armor that sashayed past him, one arm akimbo. Its other hollow gauntlet gestured at the strings of its floating harp, and the air that passed between them accelerated into a more focused assault on the seam.

Tristan vanished in a swirl of its animating green energy. "See?" said Morgause. "Nothing works."

Without turning, Akechi thrust his hand backward. "Bombs."

Resentful clucking and muttering mingled with the sounds of Morgause digging through the pouches on her belt. As soon as anything weighed against Akechi's palm, he hurled it at the barrier and reached back for the next. Glass jars shattered one after another, releasing bursts of flame, frost, and electricity, followed by the wild color shows of nuclear and psionic energies.

Still nothing.

Akechi gritted his teeth as his costume expanded and stiffened. The armor around his head and neck retreated into the fabric covering his shoulders. The point of his mask lengthened and narrowed, and he gripped it like a handle while bellowing, "Robin Hood!"

His other Persona was weaker to the point of atrophy, like an arm kept in a sling, but its skills were still situationally useful. A blast of Kougaon erupted from the tip of Robin's arrow, to no effect.

Akechi slipped back into Loki's skin and slumped forehead-first against the barrier. "Shido's going to fucking kill me."

"You think he's got another Metaverse assassin in reserve? He'll throw a tantrum and get over it. And it's his own fault for telling you to wait."

Akechi scowled. "I didn't mean literally." What was slowly being killed, day after day, was Shido's acknowledgement of him. The light that used to fill Shido's eyes as his opponents self-destructed around him, all thanks to Akechi. Even the barest scraps of respect and gratitude.

In Shido's eyes, Akechi was degenerating from an invaluable asset to an essential but malfunctioning appliance, an unreliable thing that nevertheless had to be relied upon for as long as it was impossible to replace. Something to be closely monitored and frequently kicked. He had nightmares about whispering the truth in Shido's ear and hearing in return a degrading laugh and a sneered, "No wonder you turned out to be such a disappointment."

The claws of Akechi's gauntlets scraped against the barrier, leaving no marks but dulling their own edges.

"Reaper!" Morgause crowed.

If the Reaper didn't already know where they were, it certainly did after that outburst. Not that it mattered—the Reaper always caught their scent, no matter how silently they skulked in the shadows—but Akechi still needed somewhere to direct his anger. "Shut the fuck up! One more try."

"One more try with what?"

Akechi slashed open his right forearm with his sword, drawing a long, quick stream of blood. He let it pour into the palm of his left hand, then smeared it over as much of the barrier's surface as he could.

Still nothing. At the edge of his hearing, he could make out the rattle of chains.

Morgause screeched and slammed against Akechi's back, clawing at Akechi's arms. "We gotta go now! You can have this breakdown at home!"

Akechi wrested his bleeding arm free and beat it against the barrier, scattering more of his useless blood over the stone. None of the noises Morgause made at him registered as words. The noise of the chains intensified.

Maybe the Reaper was the key. He would kill it or die trying, then use its corpse as a battering ram. He would knock all of Mementos on its side to make an altar of the barrier and a sacrifice of every human's Shadow. He would bring sixty-six shifting floors crashing down on top of it.

A hideous green light burst around him, and his stomach twisted around the sensation of being yanked up by a hook. When his vision cleared, Akechi was back at the entrance to Mementos, still bleeding, still being furiously scolded.

Nothing felt real except the throbbing pain in his arm, and even that abandoned him in the wake of a gentle glow.

Morgause slapped him briskly on either cheek with her wings before saying, "Get it together, kid. It's time to go home."

The only thing worse than Akechi's entire sense of purpose teetering on the edge of collapse was Morgause giving him a goddamn pep talk about it. He punched the floor with so much force that he wondered if any bones had cracked inside his hand—not that it was about to matter—then got to his feet. The Nav snapped him back into reality with a wave of vertigo so intense that he struggled not to puke.

His own face beamed at him from a poster near the station entrance, framed by white wings. He bought a can of cold coffee from the nearest vending machine, chugged it so fast he nearly gagged, and trudged back to his bike to cycle miserably home. Morgause flew ahead to minimize the odds of blowing his cover.

As he rode the elevator up to his apartment, losing the battle not to sway on his feet, he stared at the mirrored wall and fantasized about bashing his head open against it.

Akechi woke up disoriented with the vile taste of cheap canned coffee in his mouth. He peeked under his sheet and discovered that he had shucked his pants before passing out, but not his stupid graphic tee. His skin felt tacky with the sweat he hadn't showered off.

Flapping noises were all the warning he got before the curtains parted, letting in the sun. He slung his arm over his face and groaned. "It had fucking better still be Thursday."

More flapping. Morgause's weight settled on his forearm, talons prickling his bare skin. "Relax. It's not even noon yet."

Akechi started to wave his arm to dislodge her, only to change his mind when the sun beamed against his eyelids again. "My school—"

"Has been informed you're out sick today." She made a squawky coughing noise and added, "They said you sounded terrible over the phone."

Something Akechi had no doubt he'd be hearing about tomorrow, when he was miraculously in perfect health and leaving early to tape Good Morning Japan. He groaned again. "I'm completely and utterly fucked."

"Don't be melodramatic. Shido hasn't even called yet."

Right on cue, Akechi's phone vibrated against his nightstand. Five sharp pulses, pause for half a breath, then five again. He should have shattered it against the barrier. He should have dug deeper into the meat of himself. It didn't matter what he should have done; he made his choices, and then he lived with him. What-ifs were for fools and children.

When he answered, there was just enough of a slur to Shido's words to suggest that Shido was already pickling his displeasure in some high-end imported whisky: "I assume from your continued failure to check in that you were once again unable to do your damn job."

"Kaneshiro's Palace vanished after the Phantom Thieves changed his heart, sir." There was a sharp sniff on the other end of the line, and Akechi paused until it seemed more likely than not that his foot wasn't hovering above the pressure plate of a landmine. "Regretfully, it appears that his Shadow vanished along with it."

Glass clinked unnervingly. This pause, Akechi was certain, would blow him up if he intruded upon any part of it. "Where the hell did it go?"

"I don't know, sir." Less a lie than a simplification; Shido paid people to understand the complexities of things for him, and he was especially averse to complexity when he was drinking. "It wasn't in Mementos, either."

Another pause, packed with explosives. Then: "My office. Forty-five minutes. And keep that fucking bird away from my building."

Morgause hadn't been near it since she insisted on tagging along for a meeting two years ago, during which Shido demanded to know why the fuck Akechi had brought a speech-mimicking animal into his office. The Metaverse of it all went over so poorly that the meeting ended with a bloody feathered corpse on the floor. To make matters worse, Akechi got an especially aggressive call two days later demanding to know why the fuck he had acquired another "filthy spy bird." His attempts to explain that Morgause never stayed dead for more than a day only made Shido more paranoid and wiped out much of the goodwill that Akechi had accrued from proving his usefulness.

So all Akechi could do now was choke down everything he wanted to howl into his phone and try to sound deferential. "Of course, sir."

He heard nothing else but the glug-glug of a refill before Shido hung up.

Akechi buried his face in a pillow and screamed.

"He didn't break anything," Morgause said. "That's a good sign."

Akechi swatted at her and was annoyed when she flitted out of the way. Forty-five minutes meant he needed to be out the door five minutes ago, so he hopped into a pair of pants on his way to the bathroom to at least get the grime off his teeth and the oil off his face. If he wore a face mask and glasses en route and left his briefcase at home, he could at least reduce the odds of paparazzi photos of the Detective Prince in a panicked rush.

"Stay here until I get back," he snapped over his shoulder. "If I even think I see you following me, I'm drowning you in the sink again."

Shido was finishing another glass of whisky when Akechi arrived, sweaty and disheveled. For a tense moment, Akechi half-expected him to hurl it against the wall and command Akechi to clean up the shards with his bare hands.

Instead he demanded Akechi's unlocked phone, swiped at it with visible frustration, then shoved it back at Akechi and growled, "Prove it."

The Meta-Nav's refusal to cooperate with the unworthy helped Akechi keep a lid on his seething resentment. The app opened at the touch of his finger, and he enunciated Junya Kaneshiro's name for it.

Shido's brow furrowed at "No candidates found."

Eat shit, Akechi didn't say, with his voice or his expression. The prospect of not spending the next hour being screamed at reduced his resentment to its usual simmer.

"Hmph." After a long, loud exhale, Shido said, "I'll have to call in some expensive favors to make sure my men handle every aspect of his case. Those Phantom Thieves are becoming a real thorn in my side."

"They are proving quite the nuisance." Akechi had caught enough of his breath to keep his voice calm and nearly even. "How would you like me to proceed against them?"

A sneer twisted Shido's face. "You've been gathering intel on them, haven't you? Surely by now you can propose some countermeasures of your own."

So this was how it was going to go: Shido had a plan half-formed in his mind, and he wanted to see how closely Akechi could match its contours while filling in the details for him. A simple enough task when Akechi had caffeine and time to put his thoughts in order, and a challenge he could still rise to when he had neither.

He thought about Ren fidgeting with a tiny umbrella, asking pointed questions about Akechi's experiences as a public figure. "Their recent popularity," he began, only for Shido to cut him off with a sharp gesture.

"Not now, I'm expecting an important phone call. Shouldn't you be in school?"

They both knew there was no acceptable answer to that question, which was the entire point of Shido asking it. Claiming to have been at school until forty-five minutes ago would be telling the stupidest kind of lie, and admitting that he had exhausted himself in the Metaverse last night would make Akechi appear weak. "I'm not expected at school today."

"Mind that you don't find yourself in a spiral of lowered expectations." Shido opened a folder on his desk, probably at random, just to indicate that Akechi no longer had his attention. "Be prepared to present your best ideas tomorrow. You're dismissed."

Obviously, there was no imminent phone call; Shido enjoyed telling blatant lies that he couldn't be called on almost as much as he enjoyed making Akechi scramble across the city for a conversation that lasted less than five minutes. With heroic restraint, Akechi said, "Yes, Shido-san," and didn't slam the door behind him.

The pleasant and polite demeanor that carried Akechi back out of the building felt fragile enough to crack under the slightest additional pressure. He needed not to be in public right now, for so many reasons, but he struggled to think of anywhere to go. His apartment contained Morgause, which was his own fault. Jazz Jin was hours away from opening. The bouldering wall at his gym was too close to public, and he couldn't risk being spotted by the wrong person when he was supposed to be sick.

Absurdly, he thought about calling Ren, who was almost certainly at school and probably making plans to celebrate his success with his little gang of vigilantes. Akechi clenched his jaw and secured his glasses and mask back on his face.

There was only one place he belonged, anyway.

Without Morgause, venturing deep into Mementos was too tedious, but there was still plenty of marauding to be done on the upper floors. Alone and unarmed, Akechi crossed over at Shibuya Station and pounced on the first lumbering clump of masked desires unlucky enough to catch his eye.

It was so much quieter without Morgause around. No sounds but those of battle, wet slashes and bone-jarring collisions enmeshed with the discordant shrieks of Shadows and his own uninhibited howls. The blades of his gauntlets sliced his foes into crumbling ribbons. Loki roared out of him again and again to wipe out waves of trash.

When Loki's sword crashed down for what had to be the twentieth time, he took a vindictive moment to appreciate how much he didn't need a fucking nap.

But none of it satisfied him, even though he kept at it until his head ached and his muscles trembled. He felt like he was gorging himself on sugar, starving for nourishment as even as he stuffed himself sick. It didn't help that his stomach was beginning to cramp with actual hunger.

Even counting that sad can of coffee, he hadn't consumed any calories in at least twelve hours. His cover story for missing school today precluded his attending the briefing for tomorrow's Good Morning Japan show, which he didn't have time to make himself presentable for, anyway. Messages were no doubt piling up on his phone. What if Shido had called in a short-notice hit, just for spite? What rumors were spreading about him on social media?

He felt like something was watching him, out of sight no matter which way he turned. Even here, he couldn't escape. Frustration bubbled under his skin. He wanted to rend the flesh that clung too tight to his bones.

"Fuck!" he screamed down an empty, echoing tunnel. There was no one to stop him, so he shrieked obscenities until his throat was raw.

He thought about the Reaper, and how long he had been on this floor, and everything coming just as relentlessly for him back in the real world.

He thought about Shido groveling on the floor of his office, begging for forgiveness as Akechi dumped a bottle of expensive imported whisky over his bald head, and he climbed back to the surface.

He hadn't even fully opened the door to his apartment when Morgause greeted him with, "Where the hell have you been?"

As if Akechi owed her an accounting of his time. Deliberately unhurried, he slipped out of his shoes, mask, and glasses. "Shido's throwing money at the Kaneshiro problem. He wants me to present him with countermeasures tomorrow based on the intel I've gathered, so we'll be putting this whole debacle behind us."

"Good. And that meeting took how long?"

Instead of answering her, Akechi called the office line of Good Morning Japan's assistant director in a successful bid to go to voicemail. "My apologies for the short notice," he said, pitching his voice low and raspy, "but I've been ill today and won't be able to attend the briefing. Don't worry, I should be fully recovered by tomorrow. I assume you'll want me to discuss the appearance of all those copies of a calling card in Shibuya, but if not, please let me know what topic I should prepare for."

"So that's where you haven't been," Morgause said as soon as the call ended.

Akechi continued to ignore her and made his way to the kitchen. He wondered if visiting the Metaverse left some otherworldly stink on him, perceptible only to whatever manner of entity Morgause was. If she wanted to start a fight about it, she could do so after he ate enough to stop feeling light-headed.

Pickings were slim: nothing in the fridge but condiments, and nothing in the pantry but instant noodles. A cup of instant ramen and a bowl of instant yakisoba probably added up to a complete meal.

"You haven't eaten yet today, have you?" Morgause asked as Akechi set his selections on the counter and filled the electric kettle. Correctly interpreting his silence, she landed on his shoulder with a disapproving tut. "You can't starve yourself and then fill up on instant crap."

Undeterred, Akechi flicked the kettle on. "Watch me. Unless you're offering to cook."

"Who said anything about cooking?"

"I can't get caught eating out."

"Then order something in. There's no point in eating like you don't have access to money."

"It's Shido's money."

"And don't you want to bleed that bastard dry however you can?"

"He's already pissed off at me," Akechi said, then replayed the sentence in his head a few times, shifting the emphasis, before turning off the kettle and opening a delivery app on his phone. There was nothing stopping him from ordering a 20,000-yen steak and paying an exorbitant fee to have it brought to his apartment.

"Vegetables," Morgause prompted.

The restaurant offered a side of steamed broccoli for twice the price of a full meal at Big Bang Burger. Akechi added it to his cart along with an obscenely expensive baked potato.

Morgause's sharp little feet tap-danced on his shoulder. "I want fried chicken."

Akechi snorted. "You know that's fucked up, right?"

"You know I'm an omnivore, right?"

Because it was still Shido's money, Akechi added another restaurant and its attendant delivery fee. The minimum order worked out to be almost enough chicken to construct a life-size replica of Morgause, so that was breakfast sorted out for a while, too, if Akechi didn't want to be decadently wasteful.

With a tap, he charged more money to his Shido-issued credit card than the government had been willing to pay anyone to take him in for a month. Shoving that thought aside, Akechi shrugged Morgause off his shoulder and left the kitchen to sprawl across the sofa.

There was time to read the material that had probably been covered in one of his classes today, or delve into his social media notifications, or craft an apology for his least accommodating teachers, but he wouldn't get anything done properly while his brain was spinning like this, so he ignored everything but the one new chat message of interest on his phone. Ren had sent a photo of a steaming plate of curry captioned as "the anti-crepe."

"What are you smiling at?" Morgause asked, alarmingly close.

Akechi locked the screen and slid his phone back into his pocket. "Nothing important. What have you been doing all day?"

Her pointed reply of "Nothing important" was expected. After letting the silence loom, she picked up the television remote with one foot and waved it as if it were a piece of dirty laundry. "Everything I watched on TV was even worse than the shit they film with us. No wonder humanity's a lost cause."

If she was picking a fight, she wasn't doing it nearly as straightforwardly as usual. If she was engaging in convoluted psychological warfare, Akechi didn't have the energy for it. So he plucked the remote from her grasp and said, "Let's see how abysmal the after-school offerings are."

It had been a long time since Akechi turned on his TV without a specific purpose. When he first moved into this apartment, having a TV that he controlled had been one of many novel luxuries, like the bath he could keep at an ideal soaking temperature for as long as he pleased, or the huge Western-style bed in a private bedroom with a door that closed. After a few days, his favorite part of controlling the television was keeping it turned off. When he watched TV now, it was only to check the news or review his own performances.

The screen lit up with an advertisement for fruit snacks. Akechi flipped through the channels until he hit upon an actual show, some generic-looking drama with characters gazing tearfully at each other across an empty street. He gave it thirty seconds to do something interesting, and it failed.

Next was a cheap-looking children's anime with characters yelling at each other over four looping frames of animation. It didn't deserve thirty seconds' consideration. Nor did the noisy variety show rerun on the next channel.

Akechi felt a prick of nostalgia at the next channel's costumed heroes rallying each other to fight for justice, followed by a deeper stab of embarrassment that made him move on immediately.

He landed on another drama, this one Korean, and stayed his hand when the protagonist's internal monologue exposited that she was a mermaid pretending to be human so that she could take revenge on an evil fisherman. Specifically, she was pretending to be a dental hygienist. "This is stupid," Morgause said.

"Extremely so," Akechi agreed. He set the remote down.

Their food arrived just as the protagonist discovered that the kind and handsome young man she had fallen for while cleaning his teeth was the fisherman's son. Extremely, predictably stupid. As he got up to accept the delivery, Akechi made the executive decision to let the stupidity continue to play out at a reduced volume over dinner.

He swung by the kitchen for a suitable knife and fork before settling back on the sofa and arranging his feast to cover the coffee table. He didn't bother with plates. If he was going to indulge like this, there was no sense in applying a veneer of decorum.

"Gimme," Morgause squawked, perching on the edge of the table. When Akechi pushed the container of fried chicken toward her, she cracked open the lid like the shell of a walnut. With an eager trill, she picked up a piece of chicken with one foot and ripped into it with her beak. Table manners were in exile tonight.

The aroma that rose from the uncovered steak made Akechi's mouth water so heavily that he nearly drooled. He sawed into the meat as if it were alive and fighting back, then tore it from his fork with his teeth. The taste and texture twisted something inside him. With every bite he chewed faster, ravenous like a fire.

Morgause made a scolding noise and upended the container of broccoli over his steak. He begrudgingly devoured his way through it back to the meat.

How long had it been since he indulged like this, taking everything he wanted with no need to slow down or hold back? Even Mementos hadn't been this satisfying, because this was a far more intimate violence than the Metaverse could offer: the sensation of rending flesh with his teeth and feeling hot juices run down his throat.

He dropped his fork as he chewed the last bite, sank back into the sofa, and closed his eyes. The potato was left to cool unwanted in its container. Dialogue he couldn't understand without subtitles washed quietly over him.

When had he last felt this full? Had he ever? Shido had taken him out to a fancy buffet the day they formally entered into an agreement, and he had eaten himself sick, to Shido's sneering amusement. This time there was no anxiety or shame, only the deep, feral satisfaction of consuming more red meat in one sitting than he typically did in a week.

Morgause intruded on his moment by clicking her tongue at him. "You'd feel better if you ate regular meals instead of starving and gorging yourself."

"Fuck off. I feel great." Cracking one eye open, Akechi reached past her to steal a small piece of fried chicken. He didn't have room for it and it didn't taste nearly as good as the steak had, but he was making a point. Her disapproval left thin welts on his wrist.

With a huff, she blocked the container with her body and said, "You can have the leftovers when I'm done. If you didn't want to wait your turn, you should've traded me some of that steak."

He flicked a cold scrap of broccoli at her.

The mermaid dental drama reached its cliffhanger ending with the protagonist being caught breaking into the fisherman's house and coming up with the cover story that his son needed an emergency root canal. Next, the TV threatened, would be the news. Akechi turned it off.

To Akechi's lack of surprise, Good Morning Japan wanted him to talk about the calling card. What did surprise him when he showed up on set was that the topic saturated the rest of the segments, from an interview with a self-proclaimed expert on the history of pre-theft calling cards to a collage artist offering tips for cutting and pasting pieces of text aesthetically. A psychologist brought on to speculate about the motives behind the calling cards impinged on Akechi's territory with a clumsy attempt at criminal profiling.

Not that any of it mattered when Akechi and Morgause had already stolen the show after the first commercial break. "If only Justice could really talk," Akechi lamented to the camera, "he could tell us about any suspicious activity he saw while flying around Shibuya on Monday evening. It's possible that he even spotted the culprits littering Central Street with those calling cards."

"Phantom Thieves!" Morgause squawked. She flapped her wings for emphasis, always a crowd-pleaser.

Akechi chuckled before fitting his thumb and forefinger to his chin. "Even though he can't tell us what he saw, his vision is excellent, and he never seems to forget a face. I have no doubt that he would recognize the culprits if he saw them again. I'll be keeping a close eye on his reactions while we're out and about."

As Morgause made a show of bobbing and angling her head to peer at different members of the audience, Akechi winked at the camera. A bit gauche, perhaps, but the prospect of making Niijima squirm was too enticing to pass up. How much of her Metaverse boldness carried over to the real world, where she had no brass knuckles or motorcycle and Akechi had the power to make her a person of interest?

Not that it was nearly time to make that sort of move. She was far from the most interesting of the Phantom Thieves, anyway.

As soon as filming ended, Akechi set off for Kasumigaseki, rehearsing his talking points in his head. His plan's outline had all but sketched itself out last night as he used Morgause as an unnecessary sounding board, and on his own he had refined it into something detailed enough to impress but succinct enough not to test Shido's patience. Far better than what Shido deserved on twenty-hour hours' notice.

And god forbid Morgause appreciate that.

"You shouldn't keep talking to Shido alone," she scolded as Akechi neared the station. "He gets into your head. You need me there to keep him out of it."

"You know damn well that he'd smash your head in with a paperweight the moment you walked in the door." Insisting all conversation be held over the phone rather than behind closed doors would never have been an option, even with Shido at his least paranoid. And more importantly: "You also know that I've got the matter well in hand. I know how to play him."

She grumbled under her breath and flexed her talons into his shoulder. Before she could harangue him further, Akechi shook her off with all the muted violence he could afford to display in public, then escaped into the subway.

He had everything under control this time.

If anyone in Shido's building recognized that Detective Prince Goro Akechi, smartly dressed and with his hair still coiffed for television, was the same person who had sprinted across Kasumigaseki yesterday in masked disarray, they were polite enough not to approach him about it. A few men in suits who looked like any other men in suits acknowledged him as they passed; he acknowledged them back and idly wondered if any of them knew enough to be afraid of him.

He reached Shido's office ten minutes early, as planned, and was made to wait outside it for fifteen, as expected.

When he was finally told to let himself in, he was greeted by the back of Shido's chair, framed by the parted vertical blinds of the window that took up most of the back wall. "Damn prosecutors are whining that Kaneshiro's confession ruined their chance to build their own case against him," Shido said, still facing the window instead of Akechi. "And for some reason, I'm hearing about it. Certain people in the hierarchy seem to have forgotten that it's their job to keep the howls of the rabble from reaching the ears of their betters."

No doubt Sae would be venting about Kaneshiro the next time she had Akechi as a captive audience. The pause felt expectant enough that Akechi said, "Inexcusable of them, sir."

With a hmph, Shido rotated slowly until he faced Akechi head-on, eyes narrowed behind his glasses. "I trust I won't be hearing any more excuses from you today."

The pause that followed did not invite interruption, so Akechi stood silently in it as Shido poured two fingers of dark liquor into a lowball glass, then half-filled a taller glass from a pitcher of water. He pushed the latter to the end of the desk near Akechi and pointedly did not offer Akechi a seat.

Akechi could only hope that Shido was getting the petty power plays out of the way upfront. "Thank you," he said, maintaining a neutral smile, then obligingly waited for Shido to drink before taking a sip of the water.

Shido addressed his glass rather than Akechi as he said, "If I'd had a complete list of their identities earlier, they could simply have met with a series of unfortunate accidents. But now belief in these so-called 'Phantom Thieves' is too widespread." His gaze swung back to Akechi. "If these incidents were to end without the culprits being caught and punished, it would cast a pall over my new administration."

Akechi's muscles clenched and unclenched in waves. Bullshit, and they both knew it. Those identities had been deduced, confirmed, and provided in a timely fashion despite the simultaneous proliferation of other responsibilities. He didn't bite his tongue fast enough to stop himself from pointing out, "Their Shadows have been untouchable from the start."

"You're far from the only cause of 'accidents' I have at my disposal," Shido replied with a derisive sniff, as if the violent deaths of three students at an academy that was already under a media spotlight wouldn't have caused even more problems. "But there's no use dwelling on lost opportunities. How do you propose turning the situation as it is now to my advantage?"

Here it was. Focus.

Akechi took another sip of water to clear his throat before saying, "Their popularity as vigilantes who mysteriously change hearts makes them perfect scapegoats for the rampages and mental shutdowns. I've already laid the groundwork to conflate their Metaverse activities with mine. In one fell swoop, we'll remove them along with any lingering public anxieties about the incidents from the last two years."

An expected degree of contempt curled Shido's lip. "Discrediting and framing the problem, as usual. A less confident person might be wary of being seen as a one-trick pony."

Breathe. Smile without teeth. "I can also leverage my access to the Phantom Thieves' leader to identify and influence their choice of targets. As long as we're allowing them to operate, wouldn't you prefer they go after your enemies instead of your allies?"

The glittering of Shido's eyes made it clear that Akechi was in the middle of another minefield. "Why would I need their services when I have yours?"

"In addition to, not in place of," Akechi replied, keeping his voice even. "When you're planning to slaughter a cow, shouldn't you first squeeze all the milk out of it?"

Shido's hum was maddeningly ambiguous. "And what 'fell swoop' accomplishes that slaughter in this plan of yours?"

An old fantasy of picking them off one-by-one in Mementos before cornering their leader squirmed in Akechi's gut. It wouldn't fit back up his throat; it wouldn't fit anywhere or satisfy anything. He pushed it down before saying, "Revealing the existence of the Metaverse isn't an option, of course, but we could take advantage of your control of the police to falsify evidence—"

"Hmph. You're still a child, after all." The words stung under Akechi's skin as Shido continued, "You'll continue in your current role while we orchestrate their rise to fame and bait them with a target they can't refuse. Then you'll ensure that when the target is expected to suffer a change of heart, he suffers a well-timed mental shutdown."

Fuck.

Shido had already thought through the details. Akechi wasn't here to fill in the blanks as a collaborator, but as a student taking a test. How do you propose turning the situation as it is now to my advantage? carried the same expectations as Akechi's history teacher asking, What key factors led to the Meiji Restoration?

Akechi swallowed the knot in his throat before saying, "When the time comes, I'll tail them through his Palace and snipe his Shadow right under their noses. Has the target been determined?"

"Of course." Shido swirled the whisky in his glass without elaborating or breaking eye contact.

Whose resignation ended the Tokugawa Shogunate? Shido was paranoid and vindictive, and Akechi was both the carrot and the stick that he wielded against his inner circle. He wouldn't hesitate to take out the member he trusted least, both as an efficient use of resources and as a warning to the rest. Any of them was vile enough to satisfy the self-righteous Phantom Thieves' criteria for their next victim.

Was an even more corrupt successor lying in wait for the TV station president? Had the obsequious SIU director already outlived his usefulness? Perhaps the odious man who talked about his "breeding" as if he were a show dog had finally burned through his money and connections.

Then again, there had been enough unmasked irritation in Shido's voicemails lately for Akechi to let himself hope. "It's quite shameful," he said archly, "that an upstart burger mogul would consider himself worthy of following you into politics."

He hated his bloom of relief at Shido's approving smirk. "Keep your schedule open. I want him to pay for as many jobs as possible while he still can."

Killing Kaneshiro's Shadow would have been satisfying; killing Okumura's would be downright orgasmic, in a way that orgasms typically weren't when you had a nosy bird concerned that you were spending too long in the bathroom. Akechi could get through however many more weeks of obnoxious Okumura jobs were in store for him knowing that Okumura himself would die choking on his own medicine.

But now was not the time to fantasize. So far Shido had been alarmingly vague about every aspect of his plan that did not directly involve Akechi. Worse, he had stopped halfway through, with the thieves disgraced but not destroyed, as if Akechi didn't deserve to know the rest.

Best to treat this as not as a deliberate omission but as an opportunity to be seized. Surely Akechi's involvement wouldn't be limited to taking out Okumura, after all. "Then, once the masses revile them for the rampages and mental shutdowns," he began, only for Shido to cut him off with an annoyed gesture.

"Don't get ahead of yourself. Again."

Shido's pause was paved with landmines. Akechi clenched his jaw and waited.

"Be grateful I've given you this much of a peek at the bigger picture. If you want more, earn it." Shido's gaze was still sharp behind his glasses, but his voice softened: "We both know that I wouldn't be where I am today without your support, which is why your recent failures have been so deeply disappointing to me. This is your chance to live back up to your potential. Simply continue in your assigned role, wait for my orders, and carry them out promptly, to the letter."

Akechi kept himself from bristling by letting "I wouldn't be where I am today without your support" echo inside his head. As fraudulent as his professional deductions were, he was still a detective, or at least enough of one to figure out on his own what Shido wasn't telling him. "Understood, sir," he said, and waited to be dismissed.

Instead Shido kept him waiting for several long seconds, turning just far enough in his chair to gaze back out over the city. "A word of advice, Akechi-kun. If you plan to continue moving in circles of power, work on that poker face of yours."

Akechi's heart leapt up his throat and nearly choked him. If Shido knew—if Shido had the slightest suspicion—Akechi wouldn't be part of this plan, let alone a lynchpin of it. Deep breath, quietly, through the nose. Steady voice. "Could you give me an example of what I should be working on?"

After making him wait through a sip of whisky, Shido granted him a flicker of eye contact and said, "Suppose Okumura learned his place and became my most loyal and valuable ally. How convincingly do you think you could pretend not to despise him?"

Akechi summoned a polite smile. "I wouldn't have to pretend, sir; I would only have to remind myself to defer to your judgment. Of course, such an unlikely scenario won't be possible for much longer."

Shido barked a phlegmy laugh. "No," he said, gesturing toward the door as he raised his glass again, "it certainly won't."

"So what's the plan?" Morgause asked as soon as Akechi entered his apartment.

"As expected, the Phantom Thieves will be set up to take the fall for the rampages and mental shutdowns." Before she could press for details, he added, "And for Okumura's upcoming mental shutdown, in particular."

With a pleased trill, she perched on top of the shoe bench. "Finally, some good news. So what's the bad news?"

Shido devised his plan without me. He openly distrusts me. He reminded me that I'm not his only option for disposing of people. Everything's fucked if I can't get a step ahead of him again. Akechi focused on taking off his shoes to buy a moment with no expectation of eye contact. "Even more shitty Okumura jobs," he said glibly. "Shido wants to get as many payments as possible out of him before I pull the trigger."

"Of course he does." Morgause's face filled Akechi's vision when he looked up from his feet, startling him into nearly losing his balance. "What else?"

"Finals are next week."

Her gaze bored into his back as he headed for the kitchen. "You're in a mood, kid. What aren't you telling me?"

"After the last few days, I'm entitled to this mood." The levels of energy and enthusiasm Akechi had for dinner perfectly matched the container of leftover chicken in the fridge, so he carried it to the sofa with him. The texture was unappealing, but trying his luck with the microwave was unlikely to be worth the effort.

"Does that mean you'll tell me everything tomorrow?"

"No."

With a hiss, Morgause dug her talons into the armrest and puffed up her feathers. "You let him get into your head, didn't you?"

"Fuck off."

"I knew it. You're acting like a child."

Scowling, Akechi dug the remote out from between the cushions and threw it at her. She dodged easily and gave him the smug look of someone who had just had her point proven.

The mess he was in was at least half her fault, and any solution she involved herself in would probably dig him into a deeper hole with Shido. He couldn't do this with her right now. Best to distract her by throwing her a bone, and if he threw his bones right, he could keep her out of his way for a while.

"Shido made it clear that he expected more detailed information about the Phantom Thieves' methods," Akechi lied. "Understanding the mechanics of a change of heart will be crucial to framing them for Okumura's death. I need as much intel as I can get."

"So he wasn't satisfied with their leader's shoe size and part-time job schedule?"

Akechi glared at her. "You didn't give me his shoe size."

"Yeah, no shit." One beady black eye glared back, blue ring drawn in tight around it. "If they're on the same finals schedule, they won't be hanging around in the Metaverse much next week. And there's no point stalking them outside it."

"Of course there is. They're bound to let things slip in conversation, especially if Sakamoto is around."

For a long moment Morgause watched him in unblinking, judgmental silence. "I'm in charge of dinner for as long as you expect me to keep this up," she said at last, reaching into the container with one scaly foot to snag a piece of chicken. Akechi gave up on making himself eat any more of it. "And you owe me a favor."

"What kind of favor?"

"The kind that acknowledges what a pain in the ass stalking their leader is." She swallowed a chunk of meat before adding, "That guy really blends into a crowd. Funny how he's so dull outside the Metaverse."

Dull like a camouflaged predator. Morgause might have been able to see into the ultraviolet spectrum, but here she was muddling the orange of the tiger with the greens and browns of the forest. Ren's eyes were as sharp as knives behind those unflattering glasses, and his muscles were coiled beneath his slouch.

But Akechi said none of that, because Morgause's lack of insight was her own problem, and getting sidetracked from winning an argument wasn't going to be his. "Putting up with your dictatorial meal-planning is a favor," he said firmly. "Bringing you along to a meeting with Shido would be suicidal idiocy. You understand the difference, yes?"

"I know what a favor is," she replied, around the rest of her piece of chicken. "Deal?"

The odds were high that she would use it to demand a full accounting of the meeting with Shido. The prospect of laying out every anxiety and indignity made Akechi want to scream, but lying by omission was as easy as breathing with his mouth shut. "Within reason," he agreed.

"Then I'll let you know when I'm ready to call it in." Despite the undertone of skepticism in her voice, Morgause puffed up her crest and chest feathers. Her horrible black tongue licked grease from her talons. "Now put your shoes on. You're going out for salad."

* = blackmail potential

Aiders & Abetters


Metaverse guide

Mona (cat)

Transforms into bus into the Metaverse

Motives?

Can hear Morgause?


Temporary guardian

Sojiro Sakura (no criminal record)

(relation?)

No familial relation - motives?


Source of model weapons

Untouchable (Central Street, Shibuya)

Munehisa Iwai (yakuza?) *


Source of medical supplies

Takemi Medical Clinic (Yongen-Jaya)

Dr. Tae Takemi (shady, drugs?) *


Maid?

Does his laundry in full costume * Sadayo Kawakami (moonlighting

homeroom teacher

) (!) (other services?) *


Fortune teller?

Red Light District, Shinjuku

Large sum of cash exchanged for white substance (drugs?) *


Reporter Paparazza

Maiasa Newspaper

Ichiko Ohya (one Detective Prince article, quoting classmates; history of reporting on politics;

exercise caution

)


???

Kanda Catholic Church, Chiyoda

Religious??

Visits during evenings only, no alignment with scheduled services


Yoshizawa's daughter

First-year at Shujin, gymnastics scholarship

"Gymnastics lessons"


Last updated:

05/28

06/09


06/30


07/10

Change of Heart Mechanics


Necessary elements

:

Access to Shadow (Nav keywords, infiltration to Palace core)

Calling card (unlikely to be just for show)


"Distorted desires"

— referenced in calling cards, equivalent to distortion keywords?

"Securing a route"

— to Palace core/Ruler; Cat referenced "treasure"

"Treasure"

— excised piece of Shadow? May take physical form outside Metaverse; Sakamoto spotted carrying hefty "gold" briefcase

Last updated: 07/09

Chapter 6

Notes:

Got a little behind on my own update schedule when I got sick and burned through my buffer, oops. The next chapter will not be another 15k monster, which should help.

Chapter Text

Okumura paid for a Monday morning rush-hour traffic accident, so Akechi was in Mementos at dawn, hunting down an infuriatingly elusive Shadow. Conveniently, Okumura had supplied a name; less conveniently, the name belonged to a Goodness Food chauffeur whose Shadow was hiding on an unstable floor of Chemdah. Flying with Morgause was necessary to avoid the violently undulating patches of ground and explore the sprawling passages faster than they could rearrange themselves.

Flying with Morgause also drained Akechi's stamina, and he was already short on sleep. He landed to chug the energy drink he had brought along, only for the floor to wobble at the worst possible moment and make him reflexively tighten his grip. The blades of his gauntlet gouged open the can and sprayed him with Mad Bull.

At least Morgause couldn't laugh at him while she was busy being his wings. Resisting the urge to suck whatever caffeine he could out of the fabric on his chest, Akechi crushed the remains of the can and took flight again, surly and sticky.

When he finally cornered the Shadow, it took the shape of a Sudama and used its flatness to dart through the space between his arm and his body. Frustratingly fast, it led him on a chase down another endless, shifting passageway.

Did the Reaper appear on unstable floors? He couldn't ask Morgause without detaching from her and losing his quarry again. He didn't have time for any of this shit. He already wouldn't be able to stop for coffee or breakfast before school. His only choice was to keep moving.

At last a dead end stayed dead, and his target couldn't fool him twice with the same trick. As he sent Call of Chaos pulsing through its skull, his accumulated spite came out in a growl of, "I hope you die in the crash, you piece of shit."

When Akechi checked his phone after his first class, the news confirmed that a car had spun out of control on the highway, right on schedule. Its driver was one of four fatalities.

The school atmosphere the day before exams began was always tediously tense. Akechi couldn't focus on anything, restless in his own skin; the phantom sensation of his damp Metaverse outfit clinging to his chest lingered all morning, and missing breakfast probably contributed to the raw ache in his stomach that persisted even after lunch. He checked his phone compulsively under his desk, always expecting to see a missed call from Shido.

But the only time-sensitive notification he received by the end of school was a calendar reminder to visit Dogenzaka Street in Shibuya, where an amezaiku shop had reached out to his agent about their new cockatoo-shaped candies. It was a transparent bid to be featured on Akechi's food blog, but also a mutually beneficial one. He needed something to seize the spotlight from Million Sweets and Ren's rogue hand.

If the shop's staff were hoping for the crime-fighting cockatoo herself to make an appearance, they were out of luck; Morgause was stalking Sakamoto today. Beggars couldn't be choosers.

When Akechi surfaced at Buchiko-mae Square, he caught sight of the back of a messy head of hair and a Shujin uniform. Even without the cat's head poking out of the bag, the slouched posture was a dead giveaway. Ren appeared to be in conversation with someone, so Akechi slowed and recalculated the angle of his approach.

The stick-figure frame and high ponytail registered a split-second before he was close enough to hear a familiar voice chirp, "Would now be a good time?"

Yoshizawa's surviving daughter.

Akechi hadn't seen her since their brief introduction at the studio, but she remained a popular topic of gossip among the production assistants; whether she signed in with her dead sister's name remained a point of contention. After Morgause reported that Ren went traipsing around Kichijoji with her on Saturday, Akechi had engaged in some light snooping and tried both twins' names in the Meta-Nav. No hits, but lacking a Palace didn't make someone sane.

Taking a selfie with an artisanal candy bird could wait.

At Ren's nod, Yoshizawa beamed and suggested that they find a seat somewhere. Akechi didn't leave room for a response before calling, with extra emphasis on the given name, "Oh, hello there, Ren!"

Ren turned with a little jolt of surprise but a calm expression. His bag was fully zipped up, Akechi noted. Yoshizawa followed his gaze a moment later, just in time for Akechi's final few steps into their midst.

"Fancy meeting you here," Akechi said, taking satisfaction in the arching of Ren's eyebrows. He waited a deliberate moment before turning to Yoshizawa and pressing his hand to his chin as if he couldn't quite place her. "Both you and... Yoshizawa-san, I believe?"

She nodded, smiling brightly. "It's been a while, Akechi-san. I hope you're doing well."

"You two know each other?" Ren asked. His casual tone and posture were undercut by a muffled groan from his bag.

"My father's the director of a TV show," Yoshizawa said, as if she had been the one Ren was addressing. "We met when I visited the set while Akechi-san was there as a guest."

"The same set your class visited, as a matter of fact." Akechi beamed at Ren at twice Yoshizawa's wattage. "I've been filming weekly since then, but I haven't run into Yoshizawa-san since our initial meeting."

In Akechi's peripheral vision, Yoshizawa looked a bit apologetic. "I don't usually visit my father at work. I'm lucky I got the chance to meet you at all."

The most annoying part was that nothing in her demeanor suggested insincerity. Here Akechi had executed a conversational coup de main, and rather than trying to rout him, she seemed to be concerned with whether the territory he was occupying was hospitable enough. Baffling. Infuriating.

So Akechi kept his attention on Ren, who was baffling and infuriating in ways that Akechi preferred engaging with. "And how are you acquainted with her?"

Ren's expression gave away nothing. "We're friends. She's been teaching me gymnastics."

"He's taught me a lot more, though," Yoshizawa said, fully facing Akechi and obliging him to turn to her. "He helped me out of a jam once, and I don't know where I'd be now without his guidance. How do you know Akechi-san, Amamiya-senpai?"

"We're friends," Ren said again, with identical intonation. "He's taught me a lot, too."

Akechi wanted to smash his skull open on the ground and dig through the contents of his brain. Instead he said, "Our conversations are always enlightening for me, as well. All that aside, did I interrupt something? It sounded like you two were about to go somewhere together."

Yoshizawa nodded eagerly and turned back to Ren. "That's right, I was about to share some exciting news! Remember that summer competition I mentioned? I've been chosen as our club's representative!"

Ren broke into a grin. "You did it, Kasumi."

She grinned back. "This really feels like a new beginning for me. I can't thank you enough for all your help, Amamiya-senpai."

"Shujin's gymnastics club is quite prestigious, isn't it?" Akechi said. "Being selected to represent them is certainly impressive. Allow me to congratulate you as well, Yoshizawa-san."

"Thank you! I'll do my best to make everyone proud!"

Puff pieces always trotted out "radiant" to describe the smile of anyone competent enough to tilt their head and engage the muscles under their eyes. An empty word, but Yoshizawa filled it up as she all but literally glowed. The effect was unsettling, less radiant than radioactive.

Hadn't Kasumi been the dead sister's name?

"Here's an idea," Akechi said, reclaiming Ren's attention. "Why don't the three of us go somewhere together to celebrate Yoshizawa-san's success?"

There was a flicker of surprise on Yoshizawa's face, but no dimming of her smile. "That would be wonderful! Would that work for you, Amamiya-senpai?"

Of course it would. Ren hadn't even finished nodding before Akechi said, "Excellent. Would you mind if I chose the venue? I know just the place."

He didn't, but he used the time they spent agreeing to his proposal to complete a rapid-fire review of his criteria: upscale enough that the Detective Prince wouldn't be out of place, casual enough that Ren wouldn't be out of place, nowhere Ren frequented, no connection to Okumura Food or any business in Okumura's crosshairs, and no outdoor seating in case Morgause passed by or the cat felt chatty.

Cat Street clicked in Akechi's brain. Harajuku wasn't far and boasted a number of gimmicky, overpriced cafés tucked between boutiques. Recently he had subjected himself to Café De Minimis, where everything was black and white, from the decor to the employees' uniforms to the four-item menu painted on the wall behind the counter: "Coffee. Tea. Sandwich. Pastry."

The coffee and black-and-white cookie that Akechi received had been inoffensive enough; the sandwich had been something like egg salad on bread infused with charcoal, and it tasted like something that was wise to remain anonymous. His food blog post leaned heavily on synonyms for "unique."

Already leading the way, Akechi said, "I'll be interested to hear what you make of it."

Yoshizawa stuck out like a colorfully swollen thumb. While Ren grasped the vibe and just ordered coffee, she felt the need to ask the staff about the specifics of the sandwich and pastry, ensnaring herself in a circular conversation that ended with her ordering only tea.

"Did you want something to eat?" Ren asked her, pretending to be a gentleman, as they settled in at a sleek black table with their drinks. Their bags took up the extra seats; Ren's, divested of the cat, sat between him and Akechi.

She shook her head a bit sheepishly. "I have to be mindful about balancing what I eat with my activity level, and I've already got today all planned out. I was just curious. Most places give you a little more information about what you're ordering, don't they?"

"At some establishments, the mystery is part of the appeal." Akechi smiled and took a sip of his mediocre coffee, already cooling in the aggressive air conditioning. He dropped his voice to add, "To be frank, mystery accounts for all of the sandwich's appeal."

Ren raised his own cup and an eyebrow, flashing a glimpse of a smirk around the edge of the white ceramic. "What about the pastry?"

Akechi let his mouth curve a little too sharply in return. "Not bad if you're into that sort of thing, I suppose."

"Do you not actually like sweets, Akechi-san?" Yoshizawa asked. "I see you eating them on TV all the time."

Without looking at her, Akechi replied, "I don't have to be especially mindful about balancing food and exercise, but I do need to be mindful of how I market myself. When I'm in public, I embody the Detective Prince, and he has a sweet tooth."

"It sounds like being a celebrity is its own kind of gymnastics." That was unexpected enough to draw his attention. Still smiling brightly, Yoshizawa continued, "You have to make your whole life about it if you want to succeed. I'm always thinking about how I move, what I eat, and even what temperature my body is. And when I compete, I can't just focus on my body; I get judged on my facial expressions, and if I'm doing a routine with a ribbon, I have to keep track of it perfectly so I don't put any knots in it."

"That's pretty intense," said Ren, whose "gymnastics lessons" clearly hadn't covered any of that. His face turned more toward Akechi as he asked, "Is it worth it?"

"For me, yes." Yoshizawa remained unnervingly cheerful. "It's always been my dream to compete internationally. I'm carrying on my little sister's dream, too."

Akechi took another sip of coffee before saying, "Once you've walked your chosen path long enough, it becomes second nature to you. Giving up after you've already come so far would be a terrible waste, wouldn't it?"

"Exactly," said Yoshizawa. "Nothing could make me give up on it now."

Although he hid it well, as always, the fidgeting of Ren's fingers against his cup gave away that he was unsettled. How strange, that someone so perceptive could have gone so long without noticing that something was off about Yoshizawa. Perhaps this was the first time he'd heard about a sister in the past tense.

Once a knife was already in, it would have been a shame not to try twisting it.

"Why don't we move on to discussing something a little more fun?" Akechi rested his chin on his hand and smiled softly, invitingly. "Yoshizawa-san, would you mind if I posed the same question to you that I first asked Ren?"

Trying to pick out signs of realization on Ren's face was engrossing enough that Akechi missed whatever physical reaction Yoshizawa paired with her pause before she said, "Go right ahead."

"The day we met on the set was also the first time I was asked to discuss what has since become something of a national sensation. Given the chance to pose a question to someone in the audience, I asked..." After giving Ren a little wink, Akechi turned to Yoshizawa and finished, "What do you think of the Phantom Thieves?"

"Assuming they really do exist?" Yoshizawa took a moment to adjust her skirt, perhaps because the air conditioning was set to a temperature at odds with dressing for the summer heat. "Well, I think their intentions are noble, but I can't approve of what they're doing."

Magnificent. Ren's head turned toward her so fast it was a wonder his glasses didn't fly off his face. Holding back a feral grin, Akechi said, "It sounds like your opinion is rather nuanced. Could I ask you to expand on it?"

Oblivious of the roiling under Ren's surface, Yoshizawa nodded. "They've been helping people in need, which is undeniably a great act. In the long run, though, I think what the Phantom Thieves are doing would be bad for society. If people could rely on the Phantom Thieves to solve their problems, I worry that they'd stop trying to make things better on their own."

Akechi's coffee was already unpleasantly cool, but he still drank it to hide what his face was trying to do. When he was fully in control of his expression, he lowered his cup and said, "How intriguing. Ren, what do you think of Yoshizawa-san's answer?"

Ren had the aura of a Shadow patrolling a Palace, expressionless and monochromatic but ready to explode into colorful violence as soon as its mask was torn off. He too took a long sip of tepid coffee. "It's... unique."

This was the best conversation of Akechi's week, if not his entire life.

As Ren avoided eye contact with her, Yoshizawa's eyes widened. "Wait, are you actually a fan of the Phantom Thieves, Amamiya-senpai?"

"It wasn't my intention to start an argument," Akechi lied. "Ren and I both do appreciate a lively debate, though. Why don't you see if you can change each other's minds?"

Ren shot him a glare and took a deep breath before turning his intensity on Yoshizawa. "You just said that helping people in need is a great act. So how can you disapprove of it?"

Apparently the one thing that made Yoshizawa visibly anxious was the prospect of arguing with her senpai. She bit her lip before saying, "Helping people in need is a great act. I just don't think being helped is always a good thing. When someone's faced with a problem to overcome, I believe it's best for them to do it themselves."

"What about problems that are impossible for them to overcome?"

Yoshizawa's hands curled in her lap, not quite into fists. "I understand where you're coming from, but there are always going to be problems that can't be solved, right? So instead of giving up and hoping for a miracle, I think it's better to learn how to keep pushing forward, no matter what."

"So you think it's wrong for the Phantom Thieves to give people hope?"

"If it's hope that they won't have to deal with their own problems, yes."

With great effort, Akechi defeated the urge to kick his feet like a giddy child. "This has turned into quite an insightful exchange. If I may summarize, Yoshizawa-san believes that it's better to endure adversity than to be miraculously saved from it."

She flinched. "That's not exactly it. Miracles are wonderful when they happen! It's just that they almost never do."

"They've happened three times this year," Ren said. "At least."

"So that's three wishes granted out of how many?" Yoshizawa paused, either to let the words hang in the air or to try and fail to call to mind how many people lived in Tokyo. "It's probably not even possible to know how many people are suffering right now, let alone save them all. Instead of believing in miracles, people need to accept that the world is unfair and decide for themselves how to live in it."

Unfair, indeed. By all accounts, the other Yoshizawa sister's death was a freak accident, a tragic convergence of bad weather and blind spots. Typically, when people had nowhere to pin the blame, they still stabbed it somewhere, often into themselves. Yet Yoshizawa didn't display a hint of anger or guilt.

"Thank you for that clarification," Akechi said cheerfully. "So Yoshizawa-san believes that miracles are wonderful but so vanishingly rare that it's cruel to encourage people's faith in them." He beamed at her before returning his attention to his target. "And Ren would rather change the world than accept that."

Predictably, Ren's eyes narrowed behind his glasses. "I believe in justice. If the Phantom Thieves can make the world a better place, then they should do whatever they can to change it."

"What if," Yoshizawa said gently, "despite their best intentions, they end up changing it for the worse?"

Ren clenched his jaw before replying, "They still have a duty to try. If I had the power to right wrongs, my sense of justice wouldn't let me do nothing."

"You know, you'd make a great superhero, Amamiya-senpai." Yoshizawa smiled again as her voice lightened, retreating from the intensity he wanted her to match. "I just think it's probably a good thing that superheroes don't really exist."

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Akechi smiled and picked up his briefcase. "Well, this has certainly been invigorating. I ought to be going now, but I'm glad you indulged my request to join you. Congratulations again, Yoshizawa-san."

Most of the tension dissipated as they said their farewells and left the café, but the awkwardness lingered like an oil slick on the sea. Akechi felt a spring in his step for the first time since the Kaneshiro debacle.

He hadn't made it a block before his phone buzzed in his pocket.

| ||Monday, Jul 1117:4964% 🔋
Ren Amamiya
Ren:

Jazz Jin

7:30

You in

Akechi:I'll make room in my schedule.

Is there anything in particular you're hoping to discuss?

Ren:

Like you can't deduce it Mr Detective

Everyone's entitled to their own opinions

But also

Some opinions are terrible

Akechi:Noted. I'll prepare myself to be subjected to your most wretched takes.

Ren:

Prepare to get wretchd

Going back to his apartment risked running into Morgause and having to make excuses for his evening plans, so Akechi settled in at a different café until it was time to head to Jazz Jin. In theory, he was studying for his exams; in practice, he was mapping out everything he knew about changing cognition.

Kasumi was the dead sister, he confirmed, and the living one was Sumire. Hadn't Yoshizawa's father introduced her at the studio by that name without her correcting him? She didn't correct Ren when he called her Kasumi, either, and she certainly hadn't reacted as if he'd called her by the name of her dead twin.

Obviously her cognition of her own identity was distorted, but she didn't have a Palace. In Akechi's experience, distortions too weak to ensconce themselves were worn down by the grind of reality. Yet if the production assistants were to be believed, Yoshizawa had been uncannily upbeat for months. Something was wrong.

Had someone excised Yoshizawa's grief from her heart and jumbled up her sense of self in the process? Morgause's reports on the Phantom Thieves' meetings precluded any such thing being a formal job for the group, and it seemed unlikely any of them could have gone rogue for it. The idea of yet another party imposing their will on the Metaverse was highly improbable.

Unless, the cold dread in Akechi's gut whispered, Shido was rolling out a replacement for him.

No. Shido wouldn't waste that kind of power on fucking with a random teenager's head. Keeping Akechi in the dark would be a top priority, too, incompatible with letting evidence wander around in public. If Shido meant to replace him, the first Akechi would hear about it would be footsteps behind him in Mementos, or the creak of his apartment door in the middle of the night, or most likely, Morgause screaming an alarm.

More importantly, Shido needed him. Even if his scientists found a way to replicate the Meta-Nav, the Metaverse ate the unworthy alive; certain members of the Phantom Thieves notwithstanding, you had to be worthy to wield a Persona. Working for Shido was inherently devaluing.

Akechi's alarm vibrated in his pocket, and he took a few deep, calming breaths before getting up. The Metaverse was vaster and stranger than cognitive psience had even begun to understand. For now, it was best to assume that Yoshizawa's situation was unusual but not unnatural.

When Akechi arrived at Jazz Jin ten minutes early, Ren was already seated at the usual table, tapping away at his phone. He sensed Akechi's approach and slipped his phone away before Akechi could get a look at the screen. "Hey."

"Good evening," Akechi replied, with a smile that came almost easily. "Getting to spend time with you twice in one day is an unexpected treat." He had scarcely sat down before Muhen dropped off two identical drinks at their table, while Ren smirked the smirk of someone enjoying his petty little power play.

"Figured I'd go ahead and order for us." Ren tipped his glass forward, obliging Akechi to clink his own against it. "You don't mind, do you?"

The drinks were a vibrant red, darker at the bottom and topped with dollops of whipped cream. The scent of mingled berries wafted into Akechi's nose as raised his glass for a taste. What could have been a cloying dessert in a glass was saved by the lack of sweetness in the cream and enough sourness to be interesting. As was to be expected of Muhen.

"Not bad," Akechi said, giving his straw a little swirl to muddle the layers. "Better than the rancid takes you promised me."

Ren groaned. "Let's pretend Kasumi's right about people not doing anything for themselves if they can rely on the Phantom Thieves, even though she's not. People who just put up with bad situations aren't doing anything for themselves, either. So how is that better?"

"It isn't, of course. In both cases, the problem is passivity." Akechi leaned forward, noting with satisfaction that Ren mirrored him. "If I may play devil's advocate, is it any better for people to waste their lives hoping for a miracle than to waste them enduring hardship?"

"False dichotomy." Ren tapped a finger on the table for emphasis. "The Phantom Thieves aren't just giving people hope. They're exposing injustices that should piss people off."

"So it's better for people to waste their lives stewing in righteous anger?"

Ren's look succinctly communicated that he knew deliberate obtuseness when he heard it. "The Phantom Thieves," he said, with another emphatic tap, "are proving that the world can be changed. It's not about solving everyone's problems. They're taking down powerful monsters, and that'll inspire people to stop giving monsters power."

"That's a bit naïve, don't you think?" Akechi drawled. "People fear change more than oppression. You can take the pot off the fire, but the frog inside won't jump out even when the water starts to heat back up."

"Some will," Ren said stubbornly. "If enough of them do, they can put out the fire for good."

"And then they'll start their own. You can't 'inspire' people out of the will to power." Allowing himself perhaps too predatory a smile, Akechi added, "The Phantom Thieves are people, too. At the rate their profile is rising, I can't imagine it will be long before they become monsters themselves."

Ren drew in a sharp breath, then tried to cover up that he was stalling by sucking on his straw. Akechi waited, chin in hand, cataloguing every twitch that belied the calm he was trying to project.

"Yeah, well, I'm not taking Nietzsche's word for it," Ren said at last, with the careful pronunciation of someone who had just wracked his memory. "I have to believe things can be better. Otherwise, what's the point?"

"I'd say there isn't one." Akechi pitched his voice television-bright, but sharp enough to crack the screen. "I don't mean that in a passively nihilistic sense, of course. The 'point' is something you can waste your life searching for, or you can decide it for yourself."

Raising an eyebrow, Ren said, "Weren't you just arguing that people are too passive and afraid to do that?"

"Most people, yes. But you and I are different, aren't we?"

Ren huffed a little laugh before raising his glass to drink again. A distracting fleck of cream clung to his upper lip until he licked it away, which was even more distracting. "Before I got arrested, I knew there was injustice in the world, but I couldn't see it. Now I see it everywhere. This world makes me so angry that I could never go back to just existing in it." The light hit his glasses at the perfect angle to obscure his eyes. "What about you?"

The illusion of vulnerability, as glimpsed in a curved mirror. "A passion for justice is just the socially acceptable obverse of raging against injustice," Akechi replied. "My own stems from an intensely personal grudge."

Ren nodded along. "So what's the story with your grudge?"

"Didn't I just say it was personal?"

Angling his head to let his eyes pierce through his glasses, Ren flashed a challenging half-grin. "If I beat you when you come at me with everything you've got, you have to tell me. Deal?"

With a louder burst of a laugh than intended, Akechi replied, "If you manage to pull that off, I'll tell you everything."

A familiar blue rectangle shimmered over Ren's head. This time it enclosed what looked like scales—no, not simply scales, but a sword with balanced pans suspended from either end of the crossguard, rendered in white on the left side and black on the right. The tip of the blade pointed to "VIII."

That had to be Justice. When Akechi looked it up later, the meaning would no doubt include the usual bullshit about balance, but the sword was still an improvement over wheels and women with cups. The only balance that suited them was a pair of blades locked together.

Ren understood that, at least well enough not to have assumed what form an uninhibited battle between them would take. Playing billiards without a handicap wouldn't come close to unleashing Akechi's full potential. So what kind of contest did Ren envision for them? How far removed was it from Akechi's fantasies of pressing a sword to his throat or a gun to his head?

Not that Akechi would be acting on those fantasies, of course. Shido's plan almost certainly precluded leading a briefly triumphant Ren out of Penguin Sniper to duel him to the death in the Metaverse. Akechi's brain still whirred to the point of overheating, trying to pick the sharpest sliver of truth to whisper in Ren's ear as a final consolation prize.

Realizing that he had lost track of his own expression, Akechi took a sip of his drink and refocused on a fight that he could have. "Come to think of it," he said blithely, "Yoshizawa-san's problem might be that she's stuck in the denial stage of grief. Anger would be good for her."

"Grief?" Ren blinked. "Kasumi said something about carrying on her sister's dream, but—"

Interrupting was probably too aggressive, but the music had just faded out at the end of an album, and the opening was too tantalizing for Akechi to resist. "Why do you keep calling her Kasumi?"

Ren blinked again. "She asked me to. Most of my friends ask me to use their given names."

Akechi did not allow himself to be redirected. "I'm not asking why you don't call her Yoshizawa. I'm asking why you don't call her Sumire."

"Because her name is Kasumi." Not quite a question, but Ren's voice pitched up at the end. "I saw it on her student ID."

That was one small mystery solved. "Kasumi Yoshizawa died in March of this year," Akechi said, lowering his voice with the weight of a succulent secret. "Her twin sister, Sumire, has since been adopting her appearance and mannerisms, as well as her name. And her possessions, it seems."

There was a long silence, during which a new album began to play and Ren stared first intently, then dazedly at his phone. He kept his thoughts from controlling his expression, aside from allowing some slack into his jaw. Whatever words he was trying to put together didn't cohere; all that eventually came out when he looked back up at Akechi was, "Why?"

Akechi shrugged and idly ran a finger around the rim of his glass. "It's really none of my business how she grieves. I just thought you ought to be made aware before you drop the wrong name in front of anyone else who knows better."

Ren held up a finger. "Can you hold off on that shit for a minute? I'm still processing."

After watching precisely one minute tick by on his phone's timer, Akechi asked, "Hold off on what, exactly?"

An unimpressed look flattened every trace of bewilderment on Ren's face. He waited for Akechi to put his lips on his straw before saying, "I'm surprised you didn't pee on me to mark your territory."

Fortunately, Akechi had not yet taken a drink; unfortunately, he still managed to choke, which took the casual edge off "Sorry, could you repeat that?"

"You heard me." Ren got to his feet and added, "And I'm sure you'll be very normal about me leaving now to go think about Ka—Sumire."

"You haven't finished your drink."

Ren headed for the exit without looking back. "It's all yours."

Akechi would not be chasing after him. Akechi would not be yelling after him, either, or hurling his half-finished drink at his back. Akechi clenched his jaw and silently counted backward from ten, then twenty, then again from twenty, until Ren was well out the door and there was no longer a scream vibrating at the base of Akechi's throat.

The thought of finishing Ren's drink made Akechi's stomach turn, but so did the thought of anyone else touching it, so he dumped it out in the bathroom sink and watched the cream melt down the drain.

Finals week passed in a slow-motion blur. Facts and formulas slid in and out of Akechi's memory, not always in sync with his exams schedule; Morgause groused about how following the Phantom Thieves around was wasting her time; emails piled up in multiple inboxes because Akechi couldn't check his phone without being distracted by the lack of messages from Ren.

Over the objections of his history teacher, Akechi's school approved his request to take two exams early to accommodate his Friday filming schedule. He suspected that the history exam he stayed late to take on Thursday was significantly more demanding than the one his classmates would be taking, but there was nothing to be done about it but wring his brain dry and write until his hand cramped.

Slipping from the top of his class wasn't an option. The moment he slipped on any front, everything would come crashing down around him.

The sun had set by the time he emerged from Kichijoji Station, and he didn't have the energy to do more than grunt when Morgause landed on him and decreed, "We're having katsudon for dinner."

Akechi rolled his eyes but put in an order on a delivery app. Shido had yet to yell at him for last week's lavish meat delivery, so why force himself to go out of his way for take-out that he would have to carry home?

Morgause watched and butted her beak approvingly against his cheek. "Good. You're going to bed early, too."

Maintaining the most pleasantly neutral expression he could muster for the passers-by, Akechi said, "As I was planning to. I took four final exams today, you know."

"Oh yeah? I had a busy day, too. I followed Sakamoto around for hours." Morgause continued relentlessly, flexing her talons for emphasis, "He complained about his exams until Amamiya and Takamaki ditched him, and then he loitered around a vending machine without buying anything. But the fun really started in Shibuya. Do you think bonkin' is code for something? Because he asked some guys what was bonkin' at that arcade on Central Street. Then he was loud about getting his ass kicked at a fighting game. Twice. He left after he won some kind of ugly mutant bear from a UFO catcher. Did you know there's a little gym in the alley across the street from that arcade? He spent an hour in there, and then he found another vending machine—"

"You've made your point," Akechi cut in, louder than he had intended. "Take him out of your stalking rotation."

Trilling smugly, Morgause fluffed up in his peripheral vision. "It's Takamaki's turn tomorrow. Hope you're ready for that play-by-play."

Just follow Ren and find out if I'm the only one he's leaving on read wasn't something Akechi could say, or even figure out how to repackage as something he could say. He only nodded and completed the walk to his building in silence.

In the elevator, staring at his tired reflection under the fluorescent lights, he tried to think about how much concealer he would need under his eyes but instead visualized the darkness of a stage behind a curtain, empty but for a steel cage with Okumura's rotten Shadow inside, reeking like an expensive cheese. Next would come the Phantom Thieves swarming in like rats, only for the bait to liquify at their touch. Then the snap of a spring and the slam of the door. Then the curtain would rise, letting in the searing glares of lights and eyes.

And then what? Shido abhorred loose ends. You didn't leave a rat in a trap and hope it never found a way out; you killed it on the spot, along with any other rats you found, and sealed off whatever opening let it inside.

This couldn't end with Akechi setting a trap and walking away. The thought of anyone else killing Ren was intolerable. The thought of Ren was intolerable.

The elevator dinged at the ninth floor. Akechi shook his head and got moving again.

When dinner arrived, he made a point of first spooning a mound of rice and runny egg into the lid of the delivery container, then topping it with a generous cut of tonkatsu. Morgause hopped excitedly back and forth as she flapped her wings to cool it.

With any luck, her good mood would last through tomorrow's Good Morning Japan taping. Every minute she spent charming the audience and performing little tricks was a minute Akechi didn't have to.

On Monday, Akechi had to make an early morning trek to an aquarium in Shinagawa to suffer the consequences of his agent booking a Marine Day event for him. "Learn about penguins with Justice and the Detective Prince!" was at least tangential to the established brand, in that penguins were birds. On the downside, Morgause was insufferably smug about getting first billing.

The promise of making his next stop the bouldering wall at his gym got Akechi through an hour of delivering penguin trivia to a room full of children who were mostly looking past him at the exhibit. "Their black-and-white coats are quite fashionable," he said with all the enthusiasm he could muster, "but did you know they're also important camouflage? From above, their black backs blend into the surface of the sea, and from below, their bellies blend into the sunlight shining through the water."

"Bellies!" Morgause squawked, imitating the penguins' waddle. The kids laughed.

Akechi carefully combed the menace out of his voice: "Perhaps Justice could pass for a very small penguin from below, but he'd get caught for sure if anyone looked down from above. Looks like he won't be stealing any of their fish today."

Morgause pantomimed despair until Akechi gave her a sunflower seed. As the kids egged him on to give her another, he did not think about Penguin Sniper. He did not think about her curling up into a cue ball, or about a bullet ricocheting to catch Ren unawares in the back of the head. He didn't want to think about anything but solving the sequences of a bouldering wall.

He still had to think about penguins for a few minutes more, until an aquarium keeper entered the enclosure with a big bucket of fish and seized the children's attention. Akechi extricated himself from the event as swiftly as politeness allowed.

On the walk back to Omorikaigan Station, Morgause grumbled, "I've still got penguin-stink in my beak. Bleh."

The smell lingered in Akechi's nose, too, sour and fishy. "I should have made you eat something out of that bucket. The kids would have loved it."

Before she could respond, his phone buzzed with a notification. Not one from Shido, but Akechi still took the excuse to ignore her and duck into an alley.

"Hacktivist Group Demands Surrender of Phantom Thieves" was the headline at the top of his search alerts, followed by variously rephrased versions from other news sites going back about forty minutes. Akechi skimmed the most recent article and found it did little more than reprint a threatening but vague message posted on the website of the hacktivist group in question.

Should "Medjed" have been a familiar name to him? Before he could search for anything to jog his memory, his phone shook in his hand. With a sinking feeling, he read the name of Good Morning Japan's assistant producer on the screen.

"Are you seeing this Medjed thing, Akechi-kun?" she asked over the rapid clicking of her pen. "Do you think it's legitimate?"

He forced a light chuckle. "'The hammer of justice will find you' is an awfully vague threat, isn't it? I'm not sure how to judge the legitimacy of such a thing."

"Don't worry about it. We'll take any angle you can come up this afternoon."

"Excuse me?"

"I know it's not your usual schedule, but it's a school holiday, right? We'd be thrilled to broadcast the Detective Prince's exclusive analysis this evening. You can take this Friday off to make up for it." Honeying her voice, the assistant producer added, "We'll bump one of our primetime shows for you."

"You can have your pick of the trash heaps," Morgause muttered.

So much for bouldering. Akechi swallowed his bitterness and said, "I'll be there in an hour."

"Faster if we take a cab." Morgause angled her hopeful face into Akechi's way as he ended the call.

Getting from southern Shinagawa to the studio would indeed be quicker by taxi, but being trapped in close quarters with a driver didn't appeal. Taxis in general didn't appeal, lately. Akechi was finding himself hyperaware of news about traffic accidents, even when they weren't the result of people answering the Call of Chaos.

Morgause trying to bully her way into a ride also did not appeal. "I think better on the train," Akechi decided, leaving it unspoken that he thought better alone. "I'll meet you at the usual exit."

After a more skeptical look than was justified, Morgause sniffed. "Don't keep me waiting."

On Akechi's first train, all the seats were taken, but there was enough unoccupied standing space for him to do research on his phone. He got the obvious out of the way first: typing "Medjed" into the Nav produced no hits, and all the news articles he could find about their activities referred to them as an anonymous collective. A few of their hacking jobs almost rang a bell; Shido had probably complained about them interfering with conspiracy-aligned corporations.

The hacks they claimed responsibility for varied considerably, though there was a marked shift over time from scandalous leaks to ransomware attacks. Their message to the Phantom Thieves didn't fit their recent pattern of demands. Shido's opening volley in the plan to bring the Phantom Thieves to ruin could have been a little more elegant, in Akechi's opinion.

At Shinbashi Station he squeezed onto a much more crowded train, which was fine; he had all the information he needed to put together talking points. Phantom Thieves: criminals. Medjed: also criminals. He just needed to script a denunciation of both that leaned more heavily on the former.

Instead he wondered who Shido had selected as the sacrifice. Getting rid of his pet IT company president would be unwise right before his planned disposal of Okumura; most likely, the Phantom Thieves would be pointed to the name of an actual member of Medjed who had nothing to do with this little stunt. Some sad little nerd who didn't cover their digital tracks well enough, who could be brainwashed into a sobbing shell of a human being without implicating anyone important.

The image of Madarame making a reviled laughingstock of himself on live TV bobbed to the surface of Akechi's mind. As it lingered, Madarame's hair dissolved into his flesh, and his haori stiffened into a suit jacket.

No. Focus. Akechi had to put together a coherent enough take to shape public opinion while it was still at its most malleable. He could portray Medjed and the Phantom Thieves as rival gangs slap-fighting for attention, perhaps. Cast the Phantom Thieves as provocateurs flirting with disaster at the country's expense. Make Ren indignant enough to reply to a week-old message.

No.

Akechi lingered underground upon arriving at Akasaka-Mitsuke Station, debating whether chugging a can of coffee would clear his head. Just how clear would his head need to be to get through an interview without a live audience, anyway? Even if he fucked up in a way that Morgause couldn't distract from, he could always insist on a second take.

Which would entail presenting himself as incompetent to the entire production staff, too many of whom already referred to him as the "bird kid" behind his back, according to Morgause's sensitive hearing. Maybe the assistant director would even make another crack under his breath about working with children.

Halfway through chugging his coffee as discreetly as possible, Akechi felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Three times in quick succession. Three messages, adding up to one deliberate refusal to complete the thought before hitting Send.

He didn't even check the name on the notifications before putting his back against the nearest wall.

| ||Monday, Jul 1811:1778% 🔋
Ren Amamiya
Ren:

Hey

What you did was fucked up

You know that right

Akechi:I was merely looking out for you.

Ren:

Are you kidding me right now

Akechi:I'll admit that I could have handled the matter with more delicacy.

Ren:

Does delicacy mean not being a dick about someone's mental health

Akechi:It does.

I've been under a great deal of stress lately, which I realize now has been affecting my judgment. I apologize for my unkind behavior regarding Yoshizawa-san.

Ren:

Good

I'd tell you to apologize to her too but

Idk

I ran into her yesterday

And she told me about her sister

Akechi:What name did she use for her sister?

Ren:

Sumire

Then I called her Sumire but she didn't react

So I said you must miss Kasumi a lot

And she said missing Sumire inspires her to carry on their dream

It made me feel insane

Akechi:It sounds as if what you say quite literally isn't what she hears.

I can't help but wonder if her condition has any relation to other recent cases of unexplained mental breaks.

Ren:

Me too

But this isn't like those rampages

Or those people who just shut down

Akechi:Indeed. Her situation is more akin to a change of heart, though it doesn't fit the mold of previous cases. For one thing, she isn't compulsively apologizing.

Ren:

The Phantom Thieves only go after criminals

Akechi:So I've heard. Regardless, isn't it curious that these incidents seem to fall into discrete categories? Even if we accept that the Phantom Thieves are responsible for some of them, we shouldn't rule out that other parties might have similar modi operandi.

Ren:

You might be onto something

I gotta leave for fireworks now but we should hang out this week

My turn to pick where and when

Akechi:I have an appointment to get to now, as well.

I'll look forward to your invitation.

An unfortunate consequence of bragging about how handily he juggled school, work, and the media was that Akechi couldn't just claim to be busy when Sae called him in. He needed a specific and extenuating circumstance, but finals were over, his most recent interview had been filmed and aired, his detective's intuition wasn't otherwise in demand, and he had feigned being sick not even two weeks ago.

So he made the journey to Kasumigaseki after school, unpleasantly sweaty in the rising summer heat, and prepared to spend the rest of his day undermining Sae. He had scarcely settled into her office before she asked, without looking up from her laptop, "How much do you know about cognitive psience?"

In retrospect, it had been only a matter of time before Sae came across the term. Akechi still wanted to scream and beat his forehead against the wall. Instead he raised an eyebrow. "Do you mean the science or the pseudoscience?"

"The one with a 'p.'"

Time to calibrate. He needed to come off as just knowledgeable enough to be dismissive. "I've seen it mentioned online. My impression is that cognitive psience-with-a-p is to cognitive science-without-a-p what homeopathy is to pharmacology."

Sae let out a short laugh. "That's a fair assessment. Its theories aren't even falsifiable, let alone supported by evidence."

"Respectfully, then, doesn't discussing it seem like a waste of our time?"

"I wouldn't divert departmental resources to it, but I've been looking into this on my own for a while." To Akechi's growing consternation, Sae continued, "Don't misunderstand. I'm as skeptical as you are, and my focus is still on the 'why' rather than the 'how' of the rampage incidents. The similarities might well turn out to be coincidental, but for now I can't rule out the culprit having a connection to cognitive psience."

When, Akechi wondered sourly, did this woman sleep? "Oh? What sort of connection?"

"The status of the mental shutdown victims matches predictions made by one researcher about what might happen to someone whose inner self was destroyed in a so-called 'cognitive world.'" Sae put particular disdain on the final two words. "Obviously that's nonsense, but the same researcher also accurately predicted the behaviors of the suspects who have gone on unexplained rampages, in a paper published before any such incidents came to light."

Bringing his hand to his mouth, Akechi pretended to barely stifle a laugh. "I wasn't aware you were the type to believe in the occult, Sae-san. Should I bring you a souvenir next I'm on set with a fortuneteller?"

Sae looked up from her laptop with a scowl. "The validity of cognitive psience isn't the issue here. The field has always been small, and there's an undeniable possibility that one of its members is our culprit. Unfortunately, the researcher I most want to question killed herself around the time that the rampage incidents began."

Akechi breathed through a sudden tightness in his chest. Focus, he reminded himself. Leave the past to rot. "And the others?"

"All formal cognitive psience research seems to have ended after her death. Which would be suspicious enough on its own, but there's also the matter of two other researchers dying under suspicious circumstances within a few months. The others that I've been able to find would only tell me that they lost faith in the field and moved on."

Swallowing did little to help with the dryness in Akechi's throat. "Sounds rather cultish, doesn't it? I'd say all of that points toward cognitive psience being the product of one woman's delusions."

Sae shook her head. "She wasn't even the founder. I found academic papers going back decades, many of which she cited in her own work." Tapping a thin, dog-eared book beside her laptop, she added, "I've had to go to some trouble to track these publications down, but I intend to follow this lead as far as it can take me."

"From the sound of things," Akechi said, with a sharper edge than he intended, "it won't be taking you very far at all."

Smugly, Sae turned her attention back to her screen. "As a matter of fact, it's already led me to a potential source. He's been stonewalling me for months. If I have to escalate to secure his cooperation, he'll have only himself to blame."

Wakaba Isshiki took to her grave any secrets that Shido's agents couldn't loot from her files. The only other known researchers in the field had been forced out, conscripted by Shido, or put on Akechi's hit list, none of which precluded an unknown one operating in secret. "Oh? Is he another cognitive psientist?"

"No, he's a personal connection of the one who killed herself. I might never have found him if he hadn't adopted her daughter."

Something tightened in Akechi's chest again, like a fist around his heart. Breathe through it, he told himself. Leave it to rot. It should have long since finished rotting away inside him.

Don't make my daughter an orphan had made everything so much worse than it needed to be.

It shouldn't have mattered. It shouldn't have made his gun rattle against his gauntlet and his finger stiffen against his resolve. In that moment, he had wished desperately that Morgause never explained any of it, that he could have pretended the results of killing a person's Shadow were uncertain.

It wasn't even as if his hands were clean before Isshiki. Every rampage had the potential for death and collateral damage; it was sheer luck that he hadn't gotten anyone killed yet, and he hadn't allowed himself to learn how many children he had cursed to a lifetime of stigma. How cowardly—how pathetic—that he had imagined a difference between setting a mousetrap and crushing a rat in his hand.

He had been quiet for too long, he realized, when Sae said, "All of which is to say, I want to take advantage of that 'detective's intuition' of yours, Akechi-kun. While I'm securing my source's cooperation, I want you to draw connections between the claims in these articles and our cases, then present me with your best theories."

"Wouldn't—" Akechi cleared his throat to cover the hitch in his voice when Sae slid a stack of papers toward him with Wakaba Isshiki's name at the top— "wouldn't that be about as useful as drawing connections to the victims' horoscopes? "

"I'll be the judge of that." Sae tapped the papers twice with her finger, as if banging a tiny gavel, before returning her focus to her laptop.

Akechi skimmed a page and a half of the first article, swaying on the line between focus and dissociation, before excusing himself to use the restroom.

It had been two years, he reminded himself, resting his forehead against the inside of a stall door. No, not quite two. The anniversary was coming up. He had promised both himself and Morgause that he wouldn't remember the date. But he always was a liar, wasn't he?

He should have been splashing cold water on his face, slapping his cheeks, and pulling himself together. Instead he used his phone to search for any news coverage of Isshiki's death. When the results lacked the information he wanted, he hesitated only a moment before plugging his credentials into a restricted database. So far there had been no consequences for using them to dig up information on Ren, after all.

This time he dug up a daughter: Futaba Isshiki. Thirteen at the time of her mother's death, making her the same age now that Akechi had been when he remade himself as a weapon. Further information on her was scarce, until it occurred to him that if she had been formally adopted by a "personal connection," not a relative, she would have been transferred to a different koseki.

How lucky for her, he thought bitterly, that a man who wasn't even obligated by blood had chosen to keep her. Her new name, Futaba Sakura, gnawed at the back of his mind until he paid attention to the address and head of the household. A cold void grew inside him, swallowing a laugh before it could bubble up his throat.

Sojiro Sakura, temporary guardian of juvenile delinquent Ren Amamiya, had adopted Wakaba Isshiki's daughter. Luck or fate or whatever unknowable power kept fucking with Akechi had struck again.

On any other day, he would have been fascinated that the Meta-Nav reported hits for both Futaba Isshiki and Futaba Sakura. Today, the intersections of cognitive and legal identities couldn't even get a toehold in the folds of his brain. He needed to stop. He needed to return to Sae's office before she sent someone to check on him. He needed to shove all of this down into the same hole as the fires and the what-ifs and the golden light guttering in Isshiki's Shadow's eyes before it crumbled into nothing.

Akechi's reflection under the fluorescent lights looked pale and exhausted. Splashing water on his face made him look worse.

"I'm afraid I'm not feeling well," he said as soon as he opened the door to Sae's office, letting himself sound almost half as wrung-out as he felt. "My apologies, but I don't think I'll be of much more use to you today."

Sae gave him a critical look, as if considering whether to argue. "Then take those copies with you," she said at last, "and find time to review them this week. You won't be busy with school, after all."

Akechi's agent had made the same point while scheduling him for an impending marathon of summer events, including a campaign for a brand of sunblock with the tagline "Skin Cancer: It's No Mystery!" He took a deep breath before replying, "I'll see what I can do."

"I'll see you after your classes end on Saturday," Sae said, claiming the last word. Akechi bit his tongue and closed his briefcase over the unwanted papers.

By the time he got home, he had begun to wonder if he really was feverish, after all. Ahead of schedule as he was, Morgause had still arrived before him and was perched on the back of the sofa with the remote in one foot. In lieu of a greeting, she said, "Aren't you supposed to be at Sae's office? She only lets you leave early if you're sick or extra bitchy."

"I'll leave it up to you to deduce which." Akechi shucked his shoes and flopped face-up on the sofa cushions, eyes closed. Morgause had the TV muted, so for a moment, he could believe in the possibility of peace.

"They're getting blackmailed again," Morgause said, which was enough to make him crack an eye open. She leaned down and clicked her tongue. "Someone hacked into their phones."

Akechi froze mid-derisive laugh at the realization that his chats with Ren might also have been exposed. He hadn't sent anything suspicious, of course. Certainly nothing incriminating. Nothing but perfectly normal messages that anyone his age might have sent to a peer.

"Did they say it was Medjed?" he asked, with what he hoped was a lack of urgency.

"Nah, someone called Alibaba, but I think he offered to help them take down Medjed. It was hard to tell with how much they were arguing." As Akechi tried to untangle that in his head, Morgause leaned in and added, "Is Medjed working for Shido?"

"Essentially, yes." Akechi spoke with the confidence of an architect of the plan, rather than someone who was taking measurements and extrapolating as the foundation was laid. After a moment's dot-connecting, he added, "Alibaba will be pointing the Phantom Thieves toward the identity of our scapegoat. Once they've been hailed as heroes for taking down Medjed, we'll aim them at Okumura and frame them for his mental shutdown."

"Uh-huh." Morgause gave him the most skeptical look her bird face was capable of making as she dropped the remote and hopped down onto his chest. "I'm calling in that favor, kid. You have to tell me what's got you all twisted up."

I'm not twisted up would have been playing right into her talons, so Akechi set his jaw and glowered. There was no getting out of this without giving her something.

Automatically he vetoed anything to do with the continuing erosion of Shido's trust in him, as well as everything to do with Sumire Yoshizawa and the creeping dread that he could be replaced. Which left Ren—about whom he was not twisted up because if anything Ren was twisted up about him—and his most recent adversity.

He blew out a frustrated breath and glared at the ceiling. "Sae's making me dig into cognitive psience with her. Isshiki's published research is my assigned reading."

In his peripheral vision, Morgause bobbed her head as if mulling this over. Her talons flexed into the front of his shirt, where littles holes would be much more noticeable. "Who else has she dragged in?"

"Until now, she was investigating it on her own."

Morgause hummed. "Wanna go into her Palace and redirect her Shadow?"

As if Sae could be manipulated as easily as a spineless fool like Kaneshiro. It felt riskier, too, to engage with the Shadow of someone who regularly interacted with Akechi in the real world. If she developed subconscious misgivings about him, she might escalate to outright distrust and hostility while he still needed a working relationship with her.

"Let's make that Plan B," he said. "Sae is a rational thinker. The more I point out the absurdities of cognitive psience, the faster she'll write it off as nonsense."

Morgause shrugged. "It's your call, but I bet wrecking shit in a Palace would put you in a better mood. Any jobs come in?"

Akechi shook his head. "Okumura knocked his biggest competitor out of the game last week. Even he might be satisfied by that for a while."

Nodding, Morgause continued perching on his chest. If she was waiting for an additional angle on the Sae problem, specifically the one that aligned Isshiki's daughter and Ren's guardian and Ren himself in syzygy, her patience would not be rewarded. Akechi turned his head toward the muted television, which was showing an ad for a new smartphone.

He could just shoo her away, he told himself. He could just sit up. Swat. Give up on preserving the fabric of his shirt. Instead his lips split open around, "It's been a while since we explored Shido's Palace."

"Yeah, and it's probably even more of a deathtrap by now." Morgause tilted her head deeper to the side, crest rising slightly. "There's no reason to go in. We can't even get near his Shadow."

"I was making an observation, not a suggestion."

"Uh-huh. Sure."

They maintained unblinking eye contact until Akechi felt his begin to water. He scowled. "Get off me."

"Sure thing, as soon as you make good on that favor."

"I already did."

"No, you gave me less than a half-assed answer. Not even a quarter-assed. You expect me to believe there's nothing else going on with you?"

Akechi scowled. "You're well aware of what my schedule has been like lately, and now the plan to take down the Phantom Thieves is underway. I still have to go to school through Saturday. Have you considered that I might just be tired?"

Morgause's head flicked back and forth, fixing him with one beady eye at a time. "Really," she said at last, flatly. "That's really what you're going with. Tired."

"I am tired, so yes. Now why don't you stop trying to be my amateur therapist and go back to being my amateur nutritionist? I haven't had dinner yet."

With a growl, she puffed out her feathers and clapped his cheeks between her wings. "Listen, kid. You've been climbing this mountain for years, you're almost at the top, and now you're freaking out right below the summit. Like that thing where people take their clothes off when they're freezing to death, because people are stupid. You're better than them. Put your damn pants back on."

The absurdity of the situation that had stunned Akechi silent was usurped by the absurdity of everything that had just come out of Morgause's beak. "What the fuck are my pants a metaphor for?"

"Your pants aren't the point. You don't seem to get how weird your behavior is lately, so I'm putting it in terms you might actually understand. You like climbing rocks, right?"

"Bouldering."

"Whatever. My point is, you can't climb while you're twisted up. You need to stay in control of your body." Before Akechi could get another word in, she wagged one of her horrible little toes toward his mouth. "Let me finish. I'm rebanking that favor. You don't want to tell me what's going on in your head tonight? Fine. Just stop letting it twist you up. You can deal with whatever it is after you get to the top."

"After" was nothing but a long fall. Where else was there to go from the top of the world? In the end, it wouldn't matter whether Akechi moved under his own power or Shido's cronies pushed him; he would take his satisfaction either way, in the form of watching Shido plummet into ruin before him.

He knew better than to tell Morgause any of that. As much contempt as she had for this irredeemably fucked-up world, she somehow still expected Akechi to seize a future from it with his bloody hands.

So he said, "This is my plan. I won't let anything stop me from seeing it through." When Morgause continued staring expectantly at him instead of moving, he added, "You don't know shit about bouldering," grabbed the fallen remote, and held down the volume-up button. For once, Ono had his hearing aid on at a convenient time; his furious pounding against the wall drowned out Morgause's squawking as she darted out of the path of Akechi's other hand.

Her talons had irreparably damaged his shirt, but it was difficult to feign outrage when Akechi had half a dozen identical ones in his closet. On his way to change into one of them, he yelled over the din, "I'm going out for ramen."

The TV was abruptly silenced. The pounding continued. Morgause flew to his shoulder, bit his ear, and said, "Brat. You're getting a set meal and you're eating all the rice and vegetables."

Akechi was spending his Friday lunch period in the deserted post-exams library when Ren messaged him an invitation to a rematch at the Yongen-Jaya batting cages. A welcome distraction that would have been even more welcome on Wednesday, when it could have gotten him out of that near-disastrous meeting with Sae, but there was no use in dwelling on that. Akechi was halfway through typing a witty reply when Shido's name filled the screen.

"Shit," slipped out under his breath, and he wasn't sure whether it was that or the buzzing that drew the glare of the student behind the circulation desk. He gave her a bright, slightly sheepish smile as he mouthed, "Excuse me," and hastened out into the hallway.

Boisterous groups of students were passing by in both directions, but taking the time to find somewhere more private risked Shido's wrath. Wishing he could tap into Ren's ability to look unworthy of attention, he answered the call with, "Akechi speaking."

"I've got a mental shutdown job for you," Shido said.

It was far from his first time being assigned a hit during school hours, but Akechi was still thrown by hearing the words while so many students' conversations overlapped in his left ear. At least their noise camouflaged any sound that might have leaked from his phone. "Yes, of course," he said, in full media mode. "May I have the details, please?"

Shido laughed derisively. "Caught you in public? Well, this shouldn't take long. The target's name is Futaba Sakura. I'd give you more information, but you've already done your research."

Akechi's breath caught and twisted in his throat. The conversations around him stopped registering as language and sluiced together into the yawning silence in his right ear. He couldn't do this in a crowded hallway. He had to do this in a crowded hallway. It didn't matter that his entire body felt numb as long as his phone didn't slip from his hand.

After a damning delay, he got out, "I'm sorry, sir, I'm not sure what you—"

"Don't waste my time," Shido snapped. "As you should be aware, there's a log of every time you've used your credentials to access a database. Don't let pretending to be a detective go to your head, boy."

Landmines everywhere. Akechi's foot was already on a pressure plate, sinking toward the finality of a click. Did Shido want him groveling? Matter-of-fact? Terrified? He reminded himself that Shido did want him, one way or another, or he wouldn't be on this nightmare of a phone call. It didn't matter that Shido despised him as long as Shido still needed him.

Akechi remembered how to breathe and settled on contrite with a hint of nervous: "It won't happen again, sir."

Shido scoffed. "I've heard that one before. Just get it done by noon tomorrow."

The call ended, and the silence rang in Akechi's ear as he kept his phone pressed against it. The smear of activity around him sharpened as a girl he didn't recognize approached, hands clasped behind her back.

"Are you feeling okay, Akechi-kun?" she asked, leaning in a little too close. "If you forgot your lunch, I'd be happy to share mine with you!"

There was a script for this: a self-deprecating chuckle, one of three all-purposes excuses, a shy smile wrapped around "Perhaps some other time." Akechi had performed it countless times before.

But he couldn't get his eye to stop twitching, and all that came out of his mouth was, "I brought my own," before he fled back into the library.

The student behind the desk used two fingers to gesture from her eyes to him, but she didn't interfere with Akechi tucking himself away in a study cubicle. His thoughts were still spinning too fast, like a 33⅓ record played at 45 RPM; ideas snagged on each other but couldn't stay connected. Shido was punishing him. Shido had far more effective ways of punishing him. How could Shido expect someone like him to bat an eye at killing a child? Shido was making him kill Isshiki's child specifically. Shido had never picked up a stone without eyeing two birds. Akechi hadn't been a child when he was her age.

The thought that he would have to loop in Morgause slammed into his brain with enough force to send all other thoughts scattering. He rested his face in his hands and took long, deep, even breaths, telling himself that he had done and survived worse, until the weight of that certainty slowed his heartbeat.

He raised his head to check his phone. Three minutes until he needed to be back in his classroom. He still hadn't replied to Ren.

"I won't go easy on you this time," he wrote, and hit Send.

| ||Friday, Jul 2217:5542% 🔋
Ren Amamiya
Ren:

Hey

Sorry I know you're almost here but

Do you mind if we change our plans

Akechi:As long as you're not cancelling on me. Yongen-Jaya is a bit of a trip from Kichijoji.

Ren:

I'm not

Today's just been

Idk

I need to relax

How would you feel about chilling at a bathhouse

Akechi:I think I'd prefer that, actually. Relaxing would do me just as much good as it would do you.

I haven't been to a bathhouse in ages.

Ren:

Sweet

I'll meet you at the station

A bathhouse was a place to peel away the outside world in layers. Shoes first, of course. Then clothes, then underclothes, until all your skin tasted the humid air. Soap scrubbed away anything that clung to you. Everything you brought with you got shut up in a little locker, the key to which you wore on a band around your wrist, so all you had to keep track of was your towel. You gave yourself over to the water, and it became your only concern for as long as you could endure its heat.

Of course, it was only a respite. The outside world would still be waiting for Akechi like Morgause staking out a train station.

The absolute relic of a bathhouse that Ren led him to was empty except for an attendant. Too early for the customers looking to end the day with a soak, Akechi supposed. By unspoken agreement, he and Ren claimed adjacent lockers but left four lockers' worth of space between them while they stripped down.

Akechi was scrupulously normal throughout the process. Eyes down, quiet and efficient, no hesitation when he got to his underwear. When he moved to put everything in his locker, he caught Ren removing his glasses and nearly fumbled.

Obviously, Ren wore his unflattering glasses to deflect attention. It was still surprising to see just how much he was hiding behind them, how tired and vulnerable his eyes looked without a barrier. Most likely, rather than correcting his vision, his glasses hung like curtains over the windows in the wall of his face.

"May I?" Akechi asked. Without waiting for an answer, he picked the glasses up from where Ren had set them down and tried them on. The lenses were no more prescription than the ones in the fake glasses that he had received from Ren.

Ren's eyes widened perceptibly for an instant before he laughed and scratched the back of his neck. "Guess my secret's out."

He had no idea how many secrets Akechi had already rooted out of him, which was why he was ultimately doomed to lose. Akechi was a step ahead in this domain, as well; he had learned long ago that drawing a curtain wasn't nearly as effective as keeping the lights off inside.

"It's safe with me," Akechi lilted, setting the glasses atop the clothes folded inside Ren's locker. He didn't need them to keep a predatory glint out of his eyes.

They were quiet again as they showered, and unlike the day's sweat, Akechi's thoughts stubbornly refused to be washed away. There wasn't any use in acknowledging now that he should have gone to his apartment after school and collected Morgause, or at least left a note if she wasn't back from tailing Niijima. While Akechi probed Ren's knowledge of his target, she could have been looking for impressions of distortions in the area, potentially picking up hints to Sakura's keywords. In the best-case scenario, they could have gotten everything over with that night.

There was no point in dwelling on counterfactuals. He could hate himself for his choices once he had no more left to make.

"I should come here early more often," Ren said, turning off the tap for his shower head. Rivulets trickled down from his wet fringe over the counters of his bare face. "Normally there's old guys everywhere."

Too many details of Ren's face had registered. Akechi hoped that he hadn't been staring. He turned off the spray pointlessly hitting the skin that he couldn't peel away and said, "Oh, are you a regular here?"

"It beats the sink at Leblanc."

Akechi hummed and followed Ren toward the big tub in the back. "You don't even have a shower where you live?"

"How many cafés have a shower?" Ren shrugged and eased himself down into the water.

Before Akechi could follow, movement registered in his peripheral vision. Through the glass separating the changing room from the bathing area, the attendant waved and mimed smoking. Akechi waved back.

"Looks like we're all alone now," Akechi said, then let out an involuntary sigh as he sank down beside Ren. The heat enveloped him with a familiar comfort that his tub at home, fancy as it was, lacked. Something about the space, where the thick air smelled faintly of cleaning products and small sounds echoed softly between the tiles and the high ceiling, just felt safe. If he closed his eyes, he thought that he might feel like a child again.

But he kept them open and on Ren, who gazed back with his own too-honest, too-tired eyes. "Looks like it," Ren said at length. "So how was your day?"

Akechi narrowly stifled a deranged laugh. "A bit busier than usual," he replied, voice level despite the dizzying acceleration of his pulse. "I'm looking forward to at least not having to worry about school for a few weeks. How was yours?"

"Honestly? Bad." Ren sank lower and tipped his head back, breaking eye contact.

When he didn't elaborate, Akechi asked, "Trouble at school? Or home, perhaps?"

"You were supposed to leave your detective hat in your locker."

"My nosiness right now is personal, not professional. Besides, if you didn't want to tell me about it, you wouldn't have danced around it in your messages."

"Rude to call a guy out like that." Ren took a deep breath and stared up at the distant ceiling. Even at an angle, his eyes continued to give him away; Akechi could almost see the thoughts untangling behind them.

The silence dragged out for a few more seconds before Ren said, "I keep getting into arguments with everyone. It sucks. Today sucked more, because I thought things were getting better with Boss." He sighed and let his head fall forward, hooking eyes with Akechi again. "At least arguing with you is fun."

Morgause had mentioned that the Phantom Thieves were at odds over the Medjed situation. Perhaps Ren alone was sharp enough to suspect that the immediate danger was a distraction from the approach of one far subtler and greater. Akechi gave him just enough of a smirk to acknowledge the little barb before saying, "Trouble at work, then?"

Ren blinked, then let out a puff of laughter that disturbed the water under his chin. "'Boss' is what my guardian told me to call him."

"Ah, I see." The segue was too perfect to pass up. "Does he ask everyone to call him that?"

"I guess? All his customers do."

"What about his family?"

Ren's eyes narrowed for a tick. "Funny coincidence," he said, in a tone that suggested it might be neither. "His family is a mystery I've been looking into myself."

If he thought he was luring Akechi into a trap, he was underestimating Akechi's ability to pursue dangerous prey. Akechi leaned forward with a sly smile. "Well, color me intrigued. Perhaps I can assist with your investigation."

Straightening up from his slump, Ren leaned in at the same angle. "Let's find out," he said, naked eyes sparkling. "You work with Sae Niijima, right? Has she mentioned someone called Futaba Sakura?"

Akechi had to fight the impulse to bare his teeth and laugh. A reckless opening swing, all but guaranteeing Ren a knockout if it landed but leaving him exposed if it missed. Maybe the heat was already getting to him.

It was getting to Akechi, too, but he still had the presence of mind to stay out of striking range. Futaba Sakura was unlikely to have been purposefully brought up as bait; Sae was. Akechi was certain he hadn't dropped her name around Ren, so he must have come by it via the younger Niijima and was using it to create the impression that he had done his own research into Akechi.

An amateurish effort at best. Unfazed, Akechi replied, "Not that I can recall. Do you think this person is related to the cases I've been helping Sae-san investigate?"

"Yeah." Ren lowered his voice, no doubt trying to lure Akechi closer, as he continued, "Sae was at the café again today. She threatened to make Boss lose custody of someone if he didn't answer her questions."

What the hell was Sae thinking, openly threatening a man in front of an audience, and how many similar incidents did that "again" encompass? Just how fast was her Palace growing inside her? Perhaps Akechi needed to dial down his antagonism of her, especially since she was about to be further destabilized by the loss of her leverage.

He wondered if she thought of Futaba Sakura only as leverage.

In the world outside his head, Ren was adding, "Judging by how Boss reacted when I asked about Futaba, I'm sure she's the someone he has custody of. He's never been that pissed off at me before."

"That was uncharacteristically aggressive of Sae-san," Akechi said, honestly. "Your guardian's reaction strikes me as strange, as well. If I'm understanding correctly, he has custody of someone he's been keeping secret from you?"

Ren nodded. "It's weird, right? He's never even mentioned her before."

"And you've never seen her in passing?"

"No. He's never invited me into his house, though."

"Well, you are a violent offender," Akechi said with a teasing lilt. "Is it really so strange that he might want to keep you away from a vulnerable young girl?"

Ren shook his head. "He's been keeping the whole neighborhood away from her. When I asked around, no one had even heard of Futaba. They think the only person living in Sojiro Sakura's house is Sojiro Sakura."

That significantly narrowed down the list of likely locations for Sakura's Palace, and Ren had left his flank open, as well. "Interesting. Where did you first hear her name?"

Even if he had been wearing his glasses, they couldn't have hidden the flash of consternation on Ren's face. "I saw it written down somewhere."

Akechi hummed. "Where?"

"Sorry, this week's been a blur." A clumsy dodge at best, but Akechi hadn't put everything he had into that attack, so Ren was able to roll with the punch and go back on the offensive: "Sae also said something called cognitive science might be connected to the rampage incidents. Has she at least mentioned that to you?"

Akechi's fingers twitched against the urge to grab Ren by the hair and hold his smug face underwater until the surface stilled. "I'm afraid I can't share sensitive details about the investigation."

"So that's a yes." Ren smirked. "It's what she wants to question Boss about. Small world, huh?"

Whatever game Ren was playing, it was obvious he would consider himself the winner if he shook out a piece of information Akechi didn't mean to share or broke Akechi's composure entirely. Which meant that he wouldn't be accomplishing either. "Indeed. We really do seem to share some sort of strange connection."

"Funny coincidence," Ren said again, no more sincerely than last time.

"Funny," Akechi agreed mildly, even though the water was hot and his blood vessels were dilated and Ren's face was much too close. Ren had been leading the conversation long enough, he decided. Ren wasn't the only one who could take a big swing. "If I may read between the lines, you're concerned for the welfare of this Futaba because your mutual guardian makes you live in an attic like a piece of broken furniture."

Not quite on the mark, Akechi realized when he saw the gleam in Ren's eye. "Hey, it's nicer than you're imagining. You should visit sometime."

"I'm sure it's nicer than anything you'd find in juvie," Akechi returned, switching to quick jabs, "or whatever backwater hovel you crawled out of."

Ren showed his teeth in a lopsided grin. "Damn, you pretend to enjoy sweets with that tongue?"

"I do it far more convincingly than you pretend to be a shy little wallflower."

"We all wear masks, right?" Ren slid his fingers across his face in a recklessly obvious outline of a domino mask. "I wonder if I've seen all of yours."

He didn't know. He couldn't know. He was amusing himself with the assumption that Akechi couldn't possibly catch the deeper meaning, or else he was fishing by throwing a stick of dynamite into the water. He didn't have a reason to even suspect, unless Morgause had fucked up on her own in the Metaverse, and Akechi couldn't let himself consider that right now.

"I very much doubt it," Akechi replied, tone bright and brittle in his mouth. "We haven't known each other for very long, after all."

"True. I'd be disappointed if you were that easy."

Ren had never looked more drownable. Without breaking eye contact, Akechi opened the tap to add more hot water and said, "By the way, is the heat getting to you?"

"This is nothing. There's usually an old man in here trying to boil everyone alive." Ren reached into Akechi's personal space to twist the handle further. "Is this too much for you?"

"Not at all." Akechi smiled widely, hoping the sweat he could feel on his face passed as bathwater. "Please don't push yourself on my account. Your face is quite red already, and I'd hate for this quaint little bathhouse to become your tomb."

"Candidate found," came in muffled stereo from the changing area.

They locked eyes with each other and froze.

In perfect unison they leapt out of the tub and sprinted for their lockers. Akechi shamelessly deployed a shove to make sure he got to his first. His thick plastic wristband nearly snapped from the force with which he shoved its attached key into the lock.

He got a hand on his phone at the same instant it chirped, "Beginning navigation."

Chapter 7

Notes:

I need you all to go look at louaseau's amazing fanart of Morgause's Metaverse form. It's perfect. <3 This art will sustain us all through a Morgause-less chapter.

Chapter Text

There was no stopping it.

The world lurched, and gravity pulled Akechi tumbling after it. His head throbbed. His stomach twisted. His briefcase didn't contain his gun or his sword or much in the way of Metaverse supplies, but he still should have grabbed it instead of wasting a precious fraction of a second discovering that the Meta-Nav didn't have a "cancel" button.

Fuck.

The smooth tile floor crumbled into grit. The soft light and humid air of the bathhouse were blasted away by direct sunlight and arid heat. His eyelids reflexively squinted shut.

"Huh," Ren's voice said, and Akechi forced them open.

Just out of grabbing range, Ren stood poised and wary. His left hand clutched at crotch-level a wicker basket, which had presumably been the only thing in his own grabbing range after Akechi shoved him away from his locker. His feet were obscured by white towels that must have been inside the basket during a more upright phase of its existence.

Behind him were close-packed, pale-bricked derelict buildings sporting faded signs in a language that Akechi didn't recognize. The Nav appeared to have deposited the two of them in the middle of a deserted courtyard paved with worn stones that were scarcely visible under a layer of sand. The sky above them was a hyper-saturated blue.

Fuck-fuck-fuck was still looping in Akechi's brain, and the soles of his feet were burning, but he forced himself to hold still and think. He was the one with a phone; he was the one with the power. Ren had nothing but a plastic wristband, a modesty basket, and after shuffling his feet a bit, a layer of terrycloth between his skin and the hot sand.

It wasn't too late to play innocent. Akechi just had to pass his expression off as dumbstruck, ask the right questions, and keep Ren on the defensive. As much as Akechi didn't want to do any of that with his dick out, the Palace Ruler's failure to recognize him as a threat was the only reason his cover hadn't already been blown.

So with an incredulous laugh, Akechi said, "Ah, where are we? Did I hit my head?"

Ren's eyes narrowed. Without looking away from Akechi, he dropped the basket, picked up two fallen towels, and shook the sand from them. One he wrapped around his waist; the other he held out as he took a measured step forward and said, "Your guess is as good as mine."

Akechi reached the hand that wasn't holding his phone out to accept it, and in the same moment realized that playing innocent wasn't an option after all. Sprinting for his phone in the bathhouse had tipped his hand. Ensuring that Ren's phone didn't make the trip with them had fanned his cards out face-up on the table.

But what did that matter, when Ren didn't have any cards at all?

Keeping a firm grip on his phone, Akechi wrapped the towel around his waist. Before he had decided which of his cards to play first, Ren said in a low voice, "On your left."

Akechi glanced without turning his head and stiffened.

From the gap between two buildings emerged a spindly black arm wrapped in loose strips of linen. The point of a beaked mask followed, its glowing LED eyes straight out of a bad sci-fi movie. Akechi's brain was still trying to connect mummies to robots when the Shadow swiveled its head toward him and shrieked.

He didn't get the chance to decide which mask to wear before his helmet engulfed his head and his bodysuit sealed his skin. His world tinted red. In the corner of his eye, dark flames licked over Ren's flesh and solidified into Joker's coat.

Their gazes locked, and Ren's wasn't nearly surprised enough. The last tremulous waves of possibility collapsed into a grim line.

Akechi was still the one with the power. Nothing else mattered.

What he didn't have was any weapon other than his clawed gauntlets, nor Morgause's ability to tell how much of a threat a masked Shadow posed. Hand-to-hand combat wasn't worth the risk. His cover was already blown, anyway. Might as well make it clear just how thoroughly he outclassed Ren.

"To me, Loki!" he bellowed, tearing his mask away. His Persona manifested to fill the width of the street, then brought its enormous sword down with enough force to vaporize the Shadow where it stood.

When Akechi turned to see how Ren was processing the knowledge that he was utterly outmatched, he was gone. The ends of his coattails flapped over the edge of a nearby roof a moment before his face peered down in their place. Distance and the angle of the sun obscured his expression.

As calmly as he could, Akechi called up to him, "It appears we've both been keeping secrets. Why don't you come back down here so we can clear the air?"

Ren continued to stare down like a messy-haired gargoyle. "Why don't you come up here?"

Biting back a snarl, Akechi put one hand on the jut of a windowsill, and hooked the other over a crooked sign. His left foot joined the hand on the sill. Metaverse gravity let him launch himself a full meter higher, where he secured his progress by driving the toe of his right boot into a crack. A balcony and a rusted air conditioning unit completed his path to the roof.

Predictably, Ren had already retreated to the opposite end of the roof. He maintained eye contact while firing his grappling hook sideways, then zipped after it to the top of a building just across an alley.

Akechi took a running leap and gouged the lip of the target roof with his claws. When he heaved himself up, the annoying convenience of the Metaverse had already detached and retracted Ren's grappling hook, and Ren himself was already taking aim at a higher, more distant rooftop.

Enough was enough. Even if Akechi's bodysuit hadn't been exacerbating the brutal heat, playing chase was a luxury suited for someone who didn't have a clock ticking in the back of his head. Akechi snatched his mask again to draw a curtain of lightning-bright gunfire that blocked Ren's path.

Ren recoiled almost gracefully, turning in time to watch Loki vanish. In an even calmer tone than Akechi had managed, he said, "Did you show me yours because you want me to show you mine?"

A few days ago, Ren had all but called out the rampages and mental shutdowns as the work of another Metaverse user, so watching Akechi summon a Persona should have connected the dots in his brain. He should have been in full fight-or-flight mode. Unless he had already suspected—

No, he couldn't have, not anything close to the bitterly ugly truth. The Detective Prince was created to be attractive, but only a complete idiot would have continued to be drawn in after noticing the jaws of the anglerfish beneath. Ren wasn't that much of an idiot.

Ignoring the sweat building up under his suit, Akechi set his hand on his hip and said flatly, "I've already seen half a dozen of yours. Isn't it about time we cut the bullshit?"

"Fine by me." Ren pushed his mask up on his forehead and wasted several seconds waiting for reciprocation before continuing, "How about we take turns asking questions? That's only fair."

Fairness didn't matter. The plan was fucked. Everything was fucked. Akechi's best shot at damage control was to leave Ren's corpse for the cognitive vultures and count on Niijima to fill his role within the Phantom Thieves. There was no point in dragging things out under the scorching desert sun.

Akechi still let the silence limp along until Ren said, "I'll start. How long have you been using the Metaverse?"

"Longer than you. How do you change hearts?"

"I do what my cat taught me. What did your bird teach you how to do instead?"

"Surely I don't have to spell it out for you." Ren's little flinch would have been satisfying if Ren hadn't looked almost smug in its wake, as if the confirmation of Morgause's nature had somehow scored him a point. Akechi scowled. "Do you understand the situation you're in?"

"Yeah. This is Futaba's Palace, right?"

Akechi could have consulted the Nav to be certain, but he wasn't about to expose his phone in front of an impulsive daredevil with a grappling hook. "Hers or her guardian's. The only other name I recall us saying was Sae-san's, and her Palace is nothing like this."

"Boss doesn't have a Palace. I checked." Ren paused for a moment, lips pressed together, before asking, "Did you do anything to Sumire?"

Despite himself, Akechi bristled. "No. Did the Phantom Thieves?"

"No." Ren's shoulders relaxed on an exhale. "Wanna continue this conversation back in the real world?"

Akechi sneered. "So you don't understand the situation you're in, after all."

"I'll take that as a 'no.'" With a flick of his head, Ren dropped his mask back into place. "It's your turn to ask a question."

This would have been the moment to fire, if Akechi's gun had been in his hand instead of back in his apartment. And the Metaverse would have bent the laws of physics around Ren to let him dodge the bullet, because he couldn't go down that easily. He had to blaze like a collapsing star before Akechi snuffed him out.

And just how would he go out?

He wasn't a Shadow that would crumble into oily black flakes. He wasn't hollow; he would bleed, and far more than Morgause, Akechi's only reference point, ever did. Akechi had never killed anything else that confronted him with its meat and bones and throbbing heart.

How much blood is inside you? almost made it out of his mouth before he bit his tongue. He blamed the heat. Before he could think of anything else to say, a cartoonishly sinister voice carried up from the alley: "Whatcha doin' up there, fellow traders?"

A mind distorted enough to produce a Palace was also typically distorted enough to populate it with a cast of insufferably colorful characters. This one had scarcely finished speaking before Akechi summoned Loki to vaporize it and anything unlucky enough to be near it with Megidolaon.

Ren sidled toward the edge of the roof and craned his neck. "Whatever that thing was, you overkilled it. Looks like it dropped something."

"What would I want with a Shadow's trash?"

"Don't knock it. I've been funding a whole vigilante group with Shadow trash."

Akechi inclined his head toward the long drop down. "Then by all means, go pick it up."

Ren's expression remained steady, but his voice took on more of an edge: "Weren't you the one who wanted to cut the bullshit?"

Another perfect setup for Akechi to fire the gun he didn't have. The little shit had to be doing this on purpose. Still taking turns, still playing the game.

"Indeed," Akechi drawled, hand poised over his mask. "Which of your second-rate Personas do you think is a match for mine?"

"None of them." With a challenging slice of a smile, Ren added, "I'm a match for you, though."

"Don't be ridiculous. No clever little trick of yours could stop Loki from reducing you to a bloody smear."

"Then why haven't you smeared me yet?"

Because slaughtering him with Loki wouldn't be enough; Akechi needed Ren's throat between his own teeth. When he realized that he had been quiet for too long, he let out the growl he had been holding back, along with the thoughts dammed up behind it: "Before I do, I want to make you feel your inferiority. I want to savor the look in your eyes when I break you."

It was Ren's turn to be quiet for too long, staring unblinking through Akechi. "Okay," he said at last, voice tighter but still controlled. "In that case, I want to make a deal with you."

In spite of himself, Akechi let out a noise that was too close to a genuine laugh. He compensated by wrapping extra derision around, "You and what leverage?"

"Help me change Futaba's heart, and you'll know how changing hearts works. It's driving you nuts that you don't, right?"

A lucky shot, but the hit still stung. "Don't underestimate me. I've pieced together enough for my purposes."

"But not enough for your curiosity."

"That's hardly worth indulging. No deal."

"I wasn't finished." Ren's gaze could have ignited tinder. "After we change her heart, I'll come at you with everything I've got. You pick when and where. No holds barred, no holding back."

What makes you think I want that? Akechi couldn't say, not after his unfiltered outburst. When he managed to speak over the blood roaring through his veins, his own voice sounded like a recording being played three rooms away: "So you expect me to believe that if I came at you right now, you wouldn't fight tooth and nail to survive?"

Without hesitation Ren replied, "Not if the only way for me to win would be by denying you the satisfaction."

Piece. Of. Shit. Akechi narrowly avoided screaming and stamping his foot.

Morgause would have told him to focus on his goal, do what needed to be done, and get out of the sun before he gave himself heatstroke. Morgause wasn't there to tell him anything. Only Ren was there, radiating a deranged calm, the only other thing in this artificial world that wasn't hollow.

He and Akechi both were both full of blood and bones and meat and chemicals, and even more full of everything they had to swallow down, day after day after day. Rage, certainly, seethed deep within both of them. How much of Ren was swollen with spite? How many times had he choked on the blood from his bitten tongue? How many desires dissolving in his stomach acid had tried to claw their way back up his throat?

How often did Ren damn the consequences and take whatever he wanted, like the thief he was? Akechi was something far worse, and sick to death of holding back.

There had to be a window, however narrow, between the moment a heart was bound with chains and the moment it was dragged to the depths of Mementos. Akechi could squeeze through that window while keeping his word and his pride, Ren would be compelled to keep his in turn. If Ren couldn't be relied upon to keep a solemn oath, he wouldn't have been worth breaking in the first place.

"I pick when and where," Akechi echoed, deliberately. "No holds barred. To the death. Try any funny business like stealing my phone, and the deal's off."

Ren nodded, expression deadly serious. "Any time, any place after you help me change Futaba's heart. You have to follow my instructions until then."

"I'll follow your instructions insofar as they pertain to the change of heart. I won't dance for your amusement."

"That's a shame." Ren grinned as if it had pleased him to get caught. "No funny business from you, either. The deal's off if you ditch me or stab me in the back."

Akechi grinned back with more teeth. "I wouldn't dream of either. Seeing your face while I stab you in the front will be far more satisfying."

"Then let's shake on it." Ren pushed his mask back up into his damp fringe before extending his hand.

This time, Akechi raised his own mask in response. The bleached-bright world lost its red tint, making Ren's glove more vivid in its absence. Akechi swallowed up that color under the dark metal of his gauntlet.

It came as little surprise that the air shimmered above Ren's head. Against the searing blue of the sky, a silhouetted figure hung upside-down by one leg, arms at an angle to suggest its hands were bound behind its back. Its hair brushed the upper serifs of "XII." The Hanged Man, obviously, but Akechi couldn't recall the meanings assigned to that card. Then again, why reach for symbolism when a literal reading fit the bill?

Ren's death had been inevitable from the start. The last choices that mattered had been made at the moment their paths first crossed. Akechi deserved Ren's blood on his hands.

For now all he had was Ren's glove. It occurred to Akechi that he should have let go several seconds ago, so he released it and said, "I don't have all day. Where do we start?"

The blades in his gauntlet had left marks in the leather, he noted, as Ren pointed over his shoulder. "There, probably."

Of course Ren wouldn't have attempted any funny business immediately after vowing not to, but Akechi still wasn't about to turn around like a gullible idiot. When he twisted just enough to snare the area in his peripheral vision, he caught the shape of a pyramid looming over a vast expanse of sand, shimmering in the heat.

Given that his Metaverse senses were so much duller than Morgause's, Akechi couldn't be certain of the Ruler's location, but Palaces weren't built on subtlety. "Probably," he agreed, dropping his mask back in place.

Ren leapt down from the roof to the pavement, coattails fluttering behind him. Metaverse gravity let him land unharmed on both feet. Akechi put a little more force into following and was disappointed when his weight didn't at least crack a stone.

Now that Akechi's adrenaline rush had subsided, the heat was becoming more difficult to ignore. Sweat coated the inside of his suit. His brain felt like it was boiling inside his helmet. Standing in the shadow of the building was better than being exposed to the sun on the rooftop, but not nearly better enough.

At least Ren also looked miserable, face red and shiny as he knelt to pick up the Shadow trash that had caught his eye. It appeared to be a parchment scroll with ragged edges that suggested it had been ripped from a longer one. As Ren unrolled it, he revealed figures drawn in profile with animal heads and what Akechi assumed were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs surrounding something like a crude map. Toward the torn right edge of the scroll, there was a messy hole where the head of a winged beast should have been.

"Looks like a map," Ren said, rolling it back up. "That'll make things a little easier once we're inside the pyramid." With a meaningful look at Akechi, he added, "Going back to the real world for supplies would make things a lot easier."

Akechi snorted. "Nice try. If I were you, I'd go ahead and come to terms with never seeing the real world again."

"No, you wouldn't." The scroll disappeared into one of the voluminous pockets of Ren's pants. "How do you usually cover ground in the Metaverse?"

Trudging some ungodly distance under the brutal sun wasn't an option, but neither were Morgause's wings, nor that ridiculous cat-bus. That left finding a suitable means of transportation in this husk of town, which at least had promising signs of modernity in the form of scattered tires, electrical poles, and air conditioning units.

"My usual method is unavailable," Akechi replied. "You're accustomed to engaging with Palaces on their own terms, aren't you? Find us a vehicle."

"Just a sec." Much too casually for the situation, Ren peeled off his gloves, then shrugged out of his jacket and slung it over one of his bare shoulders. As he undid the buttons at the throat of his vest, he said, "Aren't you hot in that getup?"

"Obviously," Akechi snarled. He had never tried dismantling his bodysuit before, but there were no functional buttons or zippers that he could feel. Shredding the fabric with his claws was tempting but out of the question.

Was there a point to concealing his ability to change outfits? Inside the oven of his helmet, his brain struggled to come up with a scenario where it provided a significant tactical advantage. It wasn't as if he had to reveal Robin Hood, too.

A little wave of dizziness made up Akechi's mind for him.

Irksome as it was to feel himself weaken as Loki receded, the relief of having a bare head was immediate. His gloves clung to his skin but were no match for his determination to peel them off. After wiping his palms on his trousers, he unbuckled his belt, unfastened his cape, and started on the buttons of his stiff, heavy jacket. Unlike Ren, he had a proper shirt on under it.

Ren watched closely with no attempt at subtlety. "How'd you do that?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." The dry air finally hit Akechi's arms, and with it the promise of cooling evaporation. If he got a sunburn, surely healing skills would take care of it. Morgause—

Wasn't there, and he couldn't let himself forget that.

Akechi held his mask by its nose as he shook his head hard enough to scatter perspiration out of his hair. As he put himself back in order, Ren scanned the area like an alert dog, right hand raised with two fingers extended toward his temple. A strange red glow shone through his lashes as he narrowed his eyes.

"I found something," he said, striding confidently across the courtyard. Akechi squinted after him as he kicked in a wooden shutter, revealing the black hood of a car.

Despite knowing exactly what response he'd get, Akechi asked, "How'd you do that?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." Ren turned to flash a grin before clearing away what was left of the shutter. As the sunlight reached the interior of the garage, it gleamed painfully bright from a golden overhang.

As he drew closer to investigate, he made out the shape of a shrine roof protruding over the front of the car, heavily gilded and ornately carved. The shrine extended through the space where the backseats and trunk should have been.

Akechi had never seen a miyagata hearse in person, but there was no mistaking this for anything else. He squeezed around the vehicle to find a door in the back, as expected. Feeling suddenly queasy, he tried the handle and found it locked.

"Front's open," Ren called, waving over the angled door on the driver's side.

Shaking his head clear, Akechi made his way around to the passenger seat. Ren had already slid into the driver's seat and was spinning a keyring around his forefinger. There were two keys and a charm, Akechi noted: one obviously for the car, the other probably for the shrine, and a rubber version of the yellow-and-green new driver's mark between them.

Did Ren actually drive his cat-bus, or did it drive itself? Not that Akechi had a better claim, since he suspected that riding a bike was not a transferable skill. When Ren twisted the key in the ignition, the engine roared for a split-second before lukewarm air blasted through the vents and static exploded from the speakers.

The buttons that should have turned off the radio or changed the station did nothing. Twisted all the way to the left, the volume knob only reduced the static to an incessant high-pitched hum. Akechi missed his gun keenly as he dug through the glove compartment for a suitable blunt object.

Ren's bare hand caught his wrist. "Let's not break Futaba's mind-car, okay? The noise isn't that bad."

Sneering, Akechi jerked free and said, "We're on our way to crush her free will, but sure, let's draw the line at cognitive property damage."

"That's not—" Ren cut himself off with a huff, then said, "Keep an eye out for Shadows," as he engaged the gearshift. A grinding noise underscored the revving of the engine. After another false start, the car accelerated into the courtyard.

A pair of shining red dots drew Akechi's attention to an alleyway, but the Shadow attached to them remained eerily still. A Shadow roaming in the open near the town's edge also froze at the car's approach.

The mindless shell of Wakaba Isshiki had collapsed in the path of a car. Akechi would have remembered that even if he hadn't recently snooped, because he so vividly recalled how pleased Shido had been. As he listened to Shido droning triumphantly on, flicking words of praise at him like ashes from a cigar, Akechi had been focused on not locking his knees or asking the questions lodged in his throat: How much had her daughter been told? How much had her daughter seen?

She shouldn't have seen anything at all. It wasn't as if she had come home to a dark, silent apartment and smelled that something was wrong even before she turned on the bedroom light—

The air from the vents wasn't getting any cooler, no matter how much Akechi fiddled with the air conditioning controls. The buzzing of the radio vibrated under his skin. At least the button to roll down his window worked. As Akechi breathed through the threat of nausea, he caught Ren's glance in the corner of his eye and snapped, "Watch where you're driving."

With no more than a soft bump, the car made the transition from pavement to sand. This ostentatious hearse wasn't built for off-roading, Akechi was certain, but presumably the Palace's Ruler had little to no experience in driving through deserts. A twist of the steering wheel centered the pyramid through the windshield, and Ren visibly relaxed.

"We're not going to crush her," he said, shifting his attention back to Akechi. "We're changing her heart because I'm pretty sure she asked me to."

"'Pretty sure'?"

"I don't have hard proof, but no one else could have made the request."

So she was aware, on some level, of her own distortion. Perhaps she had been involved in her mother's research from a young age; perhaps the purpose of this hit was just to remove another repository of Isshiki's knowledge from the world. "Why the hell would she want her own heart changed?"

Ren shrugged. "What were her keywords?"

They had a binding deal, and Akechi was bone-certain that they bound themselves to the same standard. Loopholes were fair game, but the rules couldn't be broken to create them; Akechi explicitly forbade the stealing of his phone for the same reason that Ren explicitly forbade Akechi from leaving the Metaverse without him.

So Akechi didn't hesitate to slip his phone out of the pocket to which the inscrutable mechanics of Metaverse costume changes had assigned it. "'Futaba Sakura, Sojiro Sakura's house, tomb.' That would explain the pyramid." As Ren's face fell, he dug in: "As you're no doubt aware, only pharaohs could command thousands of workers to labor for years to construct their massive tombs. We might deduce from this that the Ruler has a rather inflated opinion of herself."

Instead of responding like a normal person, Ren hunched over the steering wheel, shoulders shaking. The horn beeped under his weight. When he straightened back up, he said with a stern face that cracked ten words in, "Actually, that's incredibly concerning. I'd say I can't believe you're trying to dunk on her, but oh my god. We're only here right now because you couldn't help dunking on me."

And soon I'll be literally tearing you apart, Akechi didn't say, because he was busy grabbing the wheel to keep the car on course while Ren wheeze-laughed.

"This isn't funny," Ren managed, groping at the door with his right hand until he found the switch to lower the window. He stuck his head out like a dog and screwed up his eyes against the pelting sand. For a few seconds, the car lurched between accelerating and decelerating until Ren steadied his foot on the pedal.

The combined noise of the engine and the radio became intolerable.

Staring straight ahead at the pyramid, Akechi said, "You've never even met this girl. Why do you care so much?"

In the corner of his eye, he watched as Ren shook his head and recentered himself in his seat, putting a hand back on the wheel. "I told you, didn't I? My sense of justice won't let me do nothing."

Akechi let out a scoffing sound and crossed his arms. Through the windshield, the pyramid didn't appear to be getting any closer, even after Ren fumbled with the gearshift again and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The mosquito-pitched whine of the radio made Akechi fantasize about wielding Ren's head as a blunt object against it.

After what might have been a few minutes, Ren asked, "Do you think there's a body in the back?"

The only dead body that Akechi had ever needed to deal with was Morgause's. Shadows conveniently dissolved into nothing; his victims' bodies expired at a distance and a delay; his mother's body had been taken away from him, and he had been taken only once to see the stone where her ashes were hidden. Akechi channeled his annoyance at being reminded of any of that into, "Not a real one, obviously."

"I know how the Metaverse works. I mean a cognitive body."

"Why, do you expect to need it to solve a puzzle?"

Ren grimaced. "I sure hope not. I just think it would be fucked up if we're transporting Futaba's body right now."

"I highly doubt any cognitive corpse we encounter here would be the Ruler's."

"Then whose would it be?"

"Her mother's," Akechi said before he could catch himself. He had feigned ignorance about the name Futaba Sakura, but surely it was no great leap of logic to assume that her parents were dead if an unrelated man had custody of her now. "Or her father's," he added, a beat too late.

After a moment's side-eye, Ren said, "I hope it's not one of them, either."

The other key on the ring bounced against the rubber strap below the column of the steering wheel, catching the sun in flashes. Akechi angled his head out the window to keep himself from looking at it.

After what felt like a full miserable hour, even though the sun didn't move at all in the sky, they reached the pyramid. The hearse jerked to a halt when Ren braked too fast in front of the stairs leading up inside.

Akechi got out of the car and beelined for the entrance before Ren had the chance to suggest anything as inane as investigating the shrine. As expected, he heard Ren's footsteps hastening up the steps behind him. Despite the misery of exerting himself in the heat, Akechi sped up his ascent.

At the top was a long landing leading to massive double doors, made of the same stone as the rest of the pyramid and carved with symbols that were clearly not hieroglyphics. Investigating the symbols could wait. Akechi sprinted across the landing and slapped his hand against the doors almost a full second before Ren's hit next to it.

"You're welcome for the head start," Ren said, breathing hard. Akechi ignored him in favor of taking a closer look at the carvings. Currency symbols, typographical marks, random Latin characters—if this was a code, it wasn't an obvious one.

Decoding it would be Ren's problem if he insisted on solving whatever puzzles a shut-in's subconscious came up with. Akechi employed the direct strategy of digging his fingers into the seam of the doors and applying outward force. Surprisingly little of it was required to slide them apart, and the scraping noise they made as they slotted into the surrounding walls was satisfying.

Cool, stale air rushed out from inside the pyramid. It took a moment for Akechi's eyes to adjust from the sunlight, and his instinct to hold still kept him from stumbling on the stone steps scarcely a meter in front of him, leading down into dim, greenish depths. Sets of circles and lines—zeros and ones?—flickered on the walls.

"Watch out for the stairs," Ren said, unnecessarily, putting an unwelcome hand on Akechi's shoulder. Akechi shook him off and began his descent.

He wasn't even halfway down before the air felt so much cooler that he shivered when it hit the layer of sweat on his skin. At the base of the steps he paused to wipe himself down as much as he could with his jacket, then shifted back into the comforting familiarity of his bodysuit. The red filter of his mask neutralized the sickly cast to the light.

The space around him was wide open, extending and narrowing past squinting distance both ahead and above. The view was broken only by a relatively low wall, bookended by steps, with four sarcophaguses lined up in front of it and a large metallic medallion with a stylized eye hung above them. Wedjat? Was that the term? To his chagrin, Akechi was rapidly butting up against the limits of his knowledge.

Ren walked out in front of him, already back in his coat. He cupped his gloves hands around his mouth and called, "Futaba? It's me, the guy whose phone you hacked. I'm here to steal your heart."

With a loud sigh, Akechi put his hand to his forehead, gauntlets clacking against his mask. "Is this your idea of a stealthy infiltration?"

"This is a special case," Ren replied. "She invited me in."

"No, I didn't," said the echoing voice of a girl, low and monotone, weary in a way that dredged Mama's tired, Goro-chan up from the depths of Akechi's memory.

Shaking his head, Akechi scanned for the source of the voice and found a girl's thin, pale face peering down from the top of the wall, crowned by an elaborate diadem. Her eyes glowed over heavy dark circles and behind thick glasses that put Ren's to shame. Not a girl, Akechi reminded himself, but a Shadow.

"Yes, you did," said Ren, master debater. "I'd show you the receipts if I had my phone."

The Shadow stared at him, stone-faced. "To steal my heart, you have come to plunder my tomb?"

"That's how it works, yeah. But it's not really tomb-robbing if you just lead us to your treasure."

"There's no treasure here." The Shadow craned its head out over the edge, letting long strands of hair spill down the wall. In an even hollower voice, it continued, "The bandits have already taken everything of value. Try as you might, you'll find nothing here but death."

Ren stubbornly set his jaw. "If you didn't have a treasure, you wouldn't have a Palace."

The Shadow opened its mouth, then jerked back out of sight. A voice that seemed to come out of every wall at once bellowed, "Murderer!"

As Ren sprinted up the stairs toward the Shadow, Akechi briefly fantasized about an alternate universe in which he had gone home after school and taken Morgause Palace-hunting. Sometimes Morgause could sense the shape of a strong distortion in the real world when she got close enough to it, and they would have started at the address Akechi found on file for Sakura. He might even have been home by now, pushing his dinner around a plate instead of eating it. What was one more corpse in the poisoned well of his soul?

He swallowed the bile in his throat and ran up the opposite set of stairs, through echoing gauntlets of "It's your fault!" and "You killed her!"

The top of the wall was wide and flat, providing plenty of space for Sakura's Shadow to crouch on the ground and clutch its head. It was dressed in fine linen and jewelry, Akechi noted, though he had little sense of the historical accuracy of the outfit. Ren knelt beside the Shadow, hand hovering uncertainly over its shoulder as the voices overlapped toward a crescendo: "Say something! Say something! Don't just stand there! Murderer!"

All at once, silence swallowed both the voices and their echoes. Sakura's Shadow rose to its feet in a series of uncanny motions, rocking back on its heels and rolling upright as its arms fell limp at its sides. Its eyes dimmed. All of it dimmed, somehow; the pyramid's walls were visible through its form.

A cool bead of sweat slid down Akechi's spine, and something much colder crawled back up.

"That's right," the Shadow said, voice and expression flat. "It's my fault. I killed my mother."

"That's not true," said Ren, as if he knew anything at all, only to be cut off as the Shadow resumed speaking over him:

"My mother exists here. I can only exist here, too. I'll remain here until I die." Spreading its arms, the Shadow rose into the air and vanished. The pyramid shook ominously.

"Futaba, wait!" Ren yelled at the space where the Shadow no longer was. Akechi snatched one of his coattails to stop him from doing anything stupid while the ground was unstable. The far edge of the wall overlooked a deep sandy pit that Akechi had no desire to fish him out of.

On the other side of the pit, a massive barrier slammed into place to seal off access deeper into the pyramid. The rumbling ceased.

Raw, revealing thoughts threatened to spill out of Akechi, so he cut them off by asking, "Was that how this sort of thing normally goes for you?"

"No." Ren tugged his coat out of Akechi's grip and gave him an obnoxiously concerned look. "Are you okay?"

What the hell were the exposed parts of Akechi's face doing without his knowledge or permission? He consciously unclenched his jaw and drew his lips into a straight line. Once he felt fully in control of himself, he said, "Of course. I have significantly more experience dealing with Palace Rulers than you do."

"Ever had one freak out on you like that after blackmailing you into changing her heart?"

Akechi pushed his mask up to make sure his unamused expression came across clearly. "No. Have you?"

"Lot of firsts here today." Ren bit his lip, then said, "What were those voices?"

Akechi didn't have a Palace—couldn't have a Palace, if Morgause was right and wasn't just talking out of her cloaca—but he imagined that if he did, at least one room would feature a similar soundtrack. This was your fault was one of the first things his grandmother said to him when she finally, briefly met him. She could have lived a respectable life if only she'd gotten rid of you.

He swallowed and said, "Manifestations of the guilt she feels over her mother's death, obviously."

"Obviously," Ren mimicked. "I mean, did people really say those things to her? That's unforgivable."

"How the hell would I know?" Akechi dropped his mask back into place in case it was the color of the light that was making him queasy. It didn't help, so he directed his sourness into, "Maybe it really was her fault. That sort of thing does happen sometimes."

Instead of the expected umbrage, Ren's expression shaded toward something like concern again. Akechi turned his back on it and leapt onto a pillar sticking out of the sand pit, perfectly positioned as the first of a series of stepping stones across. As he jumped to the next pillar, Ren swung by him on the grappling hook.

Resentfully, Akechi made the last two hops and caught up with him at the barrier, which formed a perfect seal from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. More coded symbols covered the center, the only part not hidden behind sheets of metal or blocked by a lit-up eye emblem with glowing wires radiating from it. No sign of a keyhole or handle.

Akechi kicked it, which accomplished nothing and didn't even make him feel better.

"Any other ideas for getting that out of the way?" Ren asked.

Cracking his knuckles under his gauntlets, Akechi replied, "In my experience, anything breaks if you hit it hard enough." The impenetrable wall at the bottom of Mementos didn't count.

"Or you could not blow all your stamina on the first puzzle." Ren spent a moment studying the barrier, during which Akechi couldn't help staring at the symbols that were still making his brain itch. Why was a boxed-in "X" part of the mix? Its lines were unusually thin, and unlike the other characters, it didn't represent any sound or meaning that he was aware of. It looked more like—

Like part of the gibberish replacing the text in a corrupted document. Not a puzzle, but an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of the Ruler's mind. Taking into account the zeros and ones flashing on the walls, it seemed safe to assume that Futaba Sakura was the sort of shut-in who spent all her time hunched over a computer keyboard.

"There's got to be another entrance," Ren said. He swung the grappling hook with his right hand and held out his left. "Want a ride?"

Akechi didn't dignify that with a response, opting to retrace his route across the pillars in silence. Ren waited until he made the final leap before swinging past him, ending with a flamboyant flip to land on the floor at the base of the wall.

As Ren turned to take a bow, the floor fell away beneath his feet.

His hastily fired grappling hook rebounded from the wall. Akechi swooped down to grab him by the scruff and scold him, remembering a split-second too late that Morgause wasn't attached to his back. They went tumbling down together through a thick cloud of dust.

Like hell was Akechi letting anything kill Ren before he did. Leveraging his grip on the back of Ren's coat, he positioned his body as a shield against whatever rough landing waited at the bottom of the trap. Spikes? Vipers? An anachronistic robot firing squad?

"Hold tight," Ren said in his Joker voice. The grappling hook fired again, and Akechi clung through the jolt of it catching on something. Momentum swung them onto a broad walkway.

The impact would probably leave bruises, but Akechi's body didn't feel otherwise any worse for the wear, even with Ren landing half on top of him. He shoved Ren out of his personal space and peered over the edge to see what fate they had narrowly avoided.

About forty meters below lay a massive stone basin, half-filled with quicksand—or rather, quicksand as willfully misunderstood by hundreds of adventure stories, cascading liquid-fast from above to form a whirlpool. Hoary adventure story tropes were also going to be a feature of this Palace. Fantastic.

Ren leaned over his shoulder and said, "I wasn't expecting death traps."

"Why not?"

"Because Futaba doesn't want to kill us." Drawing back just before Akechi moved to elbow him out of the way, Ren added, "I guess it's hard not to lash out when someone's invading your heart."

It would have been kinder to kill her without first putting her through this agony, but kindness hadn't been able to tip the scales of Akechi's judgment for a very long time. The pans were both so overloaded that it could seldom even find space. "Having second thoughts already?"

"Of course not." Ren produced the scroll from his pocket and spread it out on the floor. He spun his knife a few times in his hand, no doubt considering whether Metaverse physics would let him stab steel into stone, before laying the knife flat across one corner as a paperweight.

On closer inspection, the map wasn't actually crude. Simple, yes, and broken up and arranged to fit long hallways into a square space, but there were marks indicating how the disconnected pieces fit together. Unsurprisingly, the floor trap wasn't marked.

"If that's the main hall," Ren said, tracing his finger up the leftmost segment, "then this is probably where we fell." He tapped a stack of boxes on the right. "Looks like we can climb up and take the long way around to get back. We'll probably find something to get us through the barrier on the way."

Akechi spared a wistful thought for a world in which Loki bashed straight through to the heart of the pyramid while Morgause restored the enormous amount of energy he expended in the process. In the world created by the consequences of his actions, he needed to conserve his strength. There were still plenty of hours to go before Shido's deadline, he reminded himself.

Getting to his feet, Akechi said, "Well, playing along with a Palace's rules is your modus operandi, isn't it, Joker? Lead the way."

Ren's eyebrow rose above the top of his mask. "You're not even gonna pretend you haven't been stalking me, huh?"

"A bit late for that now, isn't it?" And it wasn't as if Ren would be passing on information on to anyone else. Akechi could stuff him full of secrets, then bury him where he could never be found. "At this point, I'd rather not waste time being coy."

With a shrug, Ren stood and sauntered toward a sarcophagus placed at a conspicuously convenient height for climbing to the next tier of walkways. He pulled himself up on its head before saying, "Do you have a codename?"

"Of course not. I'm not running around playing vigilante with a group of children." To underscore his point, Akechi leapt on the wall beside the sarcophagus, drove his foot into a gap between two bricks, and free-climbed his way up.

Ren got up over the ledge first, but only because he had a head start. "Okay, first, codenames are practical. You don't want your real name getting stuck in a Palace Ruler's head. Second, codenames are cool."

Akechi's scoffing noise was drowned out by the shriek of another robot mummy Shadow, sprinting toward them with its arms extended. Loki's sword bisected it at the waist and sent the top half flying into a stream of quicksand. Black briefly streaked the sand before vanishing.

"Save some for me next time," said Ren.

"Be quicker on the draw next time," Akechi returned, despite his own disapproval ringing in his head. He felt sluggish and almost dizzy after that last attack, and he didn't have apples and granola bars in his briefcase to get his energy back up. Like a reckless fool, he had already exhausted himself; if he didn't do something about that, he would be leaving the toughest fights up to Ren, then facing Ren himself at a disadvantage.

The latter point swept the legs out from under the rest. Akechi clenched his fists for focus and stalked toward the next suitable climbing spot. There had to be some dubious recovery item in this Palace that he could make himself choke down.

Something shattered behind him, and he turned to find Ren digging through the contents of a broken canopic jar. "Those are used to store preserved viscera," he pointed out.

"And plant balm." Ren held up an incongruous little screw-top jar before slipping it into his pocket. "A couple of these shards look thin enough to use, too."

"For what?"

"Crafting supplies. If we find some silk yarn, I can make us molotov cocktails."

That Ren was in the habit of making bombs out of scraps he found in the Metaverse shouldn't have been surprising, but Akechi couldn't help letting out a sharp little laugh at the absurdity of it all. "All right. I look forward to seeing what kind of explosives you can make out of literal trash."

Ren beamed. "I can do lockpicks, too. Keep an eye out for little metal fasteners."

There was another canopic jar within Akechi's kicking distance. He broke it with a single blow, glanced at the wreckage, and said, "There might be some under those lungs." The nearby wall provided him with the opportunity to lean and appear casually disdainful, rather than tired enough to need the support.

After a few seconds of rummaging, Ren asked without looking up, "What does Justice call you in the Metaverse?"

This was none of his fucking business, but Akechi took the chance to stop subjecting himself to a minor headache. "Morgause," he said flatly.

"Huh. Why'd you pick that for yourself?"

A new headache arose. "Like I told you, I don't have a codename. I was correcting you. Morgause is Justice's real name."

Ren looked up, both hands still deep in the remains of the jar. "So you don't have a codename, but he does?"

"No, she has a stage name." To Ren's unnecessarily pensive expression, Akechi added, "She also has a stage gender."

"Okay. Sure. So what does she call you in the Metaverse?"

Akechi would have rather eaten the mess of desiccated lungs and ceramic shards than admit that Morgause got away with calling him "kid," so he rolled his eyes and said, "She doesn't have to call me anything when I'm the only person she could possibly be addressing."

"Fair enough." Ren stood up, wiping his gloves against the sides of his pants. "No fasteners in there, but I found some thick parchment I can use."

Insane Palace logic wasn't worth engaging with, so Akechi quashed his brain's attempts to connect lungs covering parchment with raw fish wrapped up in paper. He scaled the next sarcophagus normally to conserve his energy.

There was another Shadow patrolling ahead, but its back was turned and it didn't seem to hear them. Akechi ducked out of its potential sight behind a wall and looked at Ren expectantly.

Instead of sneaking up behind the Shadow and ripping its mask off, Ren set a hand on Akechi's shoulder. An enormous bird briefly manifested and flicked its long, streamer-like tail feathers as the tingle of a healing skill spread under Akechi's skin.

The glow hadn't even faded before Akechi pushed Ren's hand away and said, "That wasn't necessary."

"Sure it wasn't." Ren set his mask back on his insufferably smug face, then hurried after the Shadow, which had reached the end of the walkway and appeared to be on the verge of turning around. He pounced like a cat, landed with both feet on its hunched back, and tore its mask off from the bottom up.

The Shadow's substance burst and bubbled up into the shape of a woman with feathered arms and the silhouette of a caryatid, a figure Akechi recognized from a Mementos trip that had compelled him to wear Robin Hood's mask and subsequently spend a few lunch breaks vengefully reading up on Egyptian mythology. "It uses bless attacks," he called to Ren, keeping most of his body behind the wall.

Ren's hand flew to his mask, and a blast of Hamaon reflected harmlessly from him. He evaded the next one, then summoned his giant bird again to throw out a nuclear skill that hit but didn't strike a weakness. After a few cycles of blocking attacks and wasting his stamina trying out different elemental skills, Ren summoned a Leanan Sidhe that knocked the Isis to its knees with a burst of psychedelic light.

As the Isis groveled at his feet, Ren looked over his shoulder with the grin of a swaggering idiot and said, "Wanna see something cool?"

"I've watched you absorb Shadows as Personas before."

Undeterred, Ren replied, "It's cooler up close."

To Akechi's irritation, it was.

As they continued their climb, Ren coaxed a Lamia and a Naga into his mask as well, pausing thoughtfully each time before a ghostly light flickered up and away from him. Perhaps he needed to evict old Personas to make way for new ones. He clearly wanted Akechi to ask about it, so Akechi didn't.

"It's too bad," Ren said after stuffing the Naga into his scrapheap of a soul, "that you only get a free weapon the first time."

Perhaps he had properly awakened to his first Persona instead of vacuuming up the first generic stray Shadow he ran into. Akechi wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of asking about that, either. "Would you really want whatever sad little knives these weaklings could manifest?"

"Beats having zero knives." Ren adjusted his mask on his face before adding, "What kind of weapon did you get?"

It had been difficult on much of anything during the raw chaos of Akechi's awakening, but the glowing blue blade peeling like dead skin from the red sawtooth saber inside it burned itself into his memory. "A sword."

"That suits you," Ren said, baselessly. "Maybe we'll find something decent in a treasure chest."

Were treasure chests a normal feature of Palaces that Akechi's direct approach blew past, or did they appear only in response to the Phantom Thieves' cognition of carrying out a heist? That a mind on guard against infiltration would lock up its precious baubles made sense by Metaverse standards, but those precious baubles being weapons suited to the infiltrators made no sense at all.

Or rather, Akechi supposed, it made the same sort of sense as finding a sheet of aluminum wrapped around the brittle husk of a human heart.

On the topmost ring of ledges they found a door to a corridor that Ren was excited to point out on the map. Following the route toward the next promising door netted them no treasure chests but plenty more assorted crafting supplies. Ren's pockets were also filling up with the garbage that he insisted on bullying out of the Shadows they couldn't sneak past without a fight.

Nothing he got for his trouble made up for the energy he spent knocking the Shadows to their knees. Letting Akechi pounce on a downed Shadow and tear it apart with his claws didn't negate the need to exploit its weakness to knock it down in the first place, though, so Akechi put the energy he wanted to waste arguing into memorizing the weaknesses Ren uncovered.

How the hell did Morgause fit a full catalogue of Shadow affinities into her little walnut of a brain? Until now, the only ones Akechi had ever bothered memorizing were curse and bless, as well as whether he had to be wary of his blade or bullets bouncing back at him. He tried not to think about how much energy Ren was wasting on trial and error to learn information that Morgause could have rattled off in her sleep.

No good could come of wallowing in counterfactuals. "Take it down with a bless skill," Akechi barked when the next Shadow Ren unmasked proved to be an Andras.

Curiously, Ren kept an Angel as a Persona, despite it being far weaker than any Shadow in this Palace. Akechi chose to assume the reason was practical rather than sentimental, since its low-level skills made minimal demands on Ren's stamina. Ren summoned it now to spritz the Andras with Kouha, then opened negotiations with his usual, "I want an item."

"It won't have anything good," Akechi pointed out, wishing he could have punctuated the sentence with a bullet through the Shadow's head. Instead he made a show of shaking sand out of his gauntlet hinges.

"No, I will!" The Andras stared up wide-eyed from where it huddled on the floor, arms crossed tight over its chest. "I do have something good! Please, I'll give you anything except for my life."

Attacking it now would have meant giving up a free item, unimpressive as that item would no doubt be. Akechi's foot still itched to cave in the creature's pathetic, bleating face. At least the Shadows that spat and slung insults didn't make him feel sick with contempt.

As expected, Ren got something of highly dubious value: a single piece of hard candy. Better than the filthy old clothes a Naga had tried to foist off on them a level below, at least.

Akechi preemptively took out the next Shadow with Loki to preserve Ren's stamina, which backfired when Ren insisted on healing him afterward. Akechi grabbed his wrist and growled, "I can handle myself. Save your energy for exploiting weaknesses."

Ren's free hand grabbed Akechi's wrist at the base of the gauntlet, just under the tattered end of the sleeve. "You promised to follow my instructions."

"I didn't agree to be fucking micromanaged." Akechi resisted the childish urge to grab Ren's other wrist, but the slant of Ren's mouth suggested that he hadn't fully suppressed his intent. Embarrassing, how easily Ren could get under his skin.

Let him enjoy it while he could. He was paying for the privilege with his life.

"Just save that kind of power for the real threats," Ren said. "I'm sure we'll run into something nasty soon."

Akechi nodded, and they let go at the same time.

Sure enough, at the end of the corridor loomed a massive Shadow, blocking the obvious path forward through the only gap in a fence of spikes and columns. Its mask more closely resembled a dinosaur's head than a bird's, and its posture suggested that a humanoid form was a poor fit for it. Though it made no move to charge, it radiated a level of menace that no other Shadows in the pyramid so far had.

"See?" With a cheeky grin, Ren swept his arm toward the Shadow as it began to drone about its duty to eliminate intruders. "Think you can get it before it transforms?"

Laevateinn cut it in half as easily as anything else in the Palace, in a perfect vertical line that gouged the stone beneath it. But unlike anything else in the Palace, the Shadow's substance didn't scatter. The cleft became the seam of an oversized sarcophagus, the lid of which a pair of clawed hands pried open from the inside, just far enough for a pair of glowing eyes to peer out from the unnatural darkness within.

Akechi had never seen a Shadow like it before. He blasted Eigaon into the opening only for the dark energy to ricochet harmlessly against his chest.

"Curse skills don't work!" he yelled at Ren, springing back out of range as one of the monstrous arms reached toward him. "Try bless— "

An invisible force seized him like a giant's fist, forced the air out of him, and crushed. His vision blurred. He must have been in shock, he thought dimly; having his organs popped and his bones splintered should have hurt.

Instead he shivered uncontrollably, his heart buzzed, his lungs fluttered, and his view indicated he was flat on the floor, but the pressure was gone. He tried to shout with a thimbleful of breath and produced only a high-pitched squeak.

"You're a mouse," said Ren, absurdly, from some impossible height. "Hang tight. I'll figure out how to fix it."

"What the fuck?" Akechi tried to say, but only squeaks came out. He rolled over his (small, round) body and craned his neck (were those whiskers?) to watch Ren's towering form parkour off the columns. An overwhelming impulse to take cover set Akechi scurrying into the shadow of the nearest one.

Those were definitely whiskers. Those were definitely paws carrying him, too, with tiny claws that clicked against the stone. When he felt secure in his hiding spot, he patted his face and felt a miniature version of his mask. Suddenly he was glad that Morgause wasn't around.

"Bless is no good," Ren announced.

So much for logic. Almighty damage always worked, so Akechi tried to pry his mask off with his useless little paws, but it was stuck tight. Perhaps it was organically part of this miserable form. Loki didn't respond to his squeaked commands, either.

Over the sound of Ren testing psychokinesis, Akechi heard an ominous slithering behind him. He turned and felt his traitorous little body freeze at the sight of two Lamias. When he managed to make a shrill noise of alarm, thunder drowned him out.

At least the surge of frustration was enough to break through the freeze response. Akechi darted between spikes too close-set for the Lamias to squeeze through, only to find himself hurtling toward the telltale white bloom of an imminent Megido. He veered off at top speed, but he wasn't fast enough—

Ren, an enormous idiot, leapt in front of him to take the brunt of the blast. From what Akechi could see of his face, he at least understood the spirit of the furious scolding that Akechi was unleashing at him. He also finally saw the Lamias, and scooped Akechi up from the floor like an even bigger idiot.

"Ignore them!" Akechi squeaked. "Focus on the strong one!" To make himself clear, he sank his little mouse teeth into the meat of Ren's hand. With a noise that was half-hiss, half-laugh, Ren set Akechi on his shoulder and snapped his focus back to the big Shadow.

The sarcophagus was creaking open again, the inhuman arm emerging. They were as good as dead if they were both turned into mice. At least Ren had learned that dodging wouldn't necessarily help; he stood his ground, grabbed his mask, and summoned a Fuu-ki to blow a gust of wind into the crack.

Several things happened at once.

The big Shadow toppled like a felled tree, lid snapping shut as it hit the floor. Akechi felt himself expand from the inside out, doubling in size with each breath, and his weight knocked Ren over before he could leap clear. The room shrank around him. Standing on two legs felt wrong.

Akechi gritted his teeth and channeled Megidolaon through Loki, catching the big Shadow and both Lamias in the enormous blast radius. He didn't want for it to clear before springing forward, half-blind, to mime along with Loki slamming its scorching sword down. The dazzle still hadn't left his eyes, so he did it again, just in case there was anything left of the Shadow.

He jumped at the feeling of a hand on his shoulder, hating that he almost lost his balance. "Easy there," Ren said, in the tone of someone soothing an attack dog. "You got it." Akechi shoved him off with a snarl.

A heap of ankle-deep ash was slowly flaking away to nothing. In Akechi's peripheral vision, smaller stains marked the spaces where the Lamias had been. He rested his hands on his knees for a moment to catch his breath. That Ren hadn't even tried to heal him yet suggested that they were both running on fumes.

And they had cleared less than a quarter of the map.

He looked up when he heard the crinkling of a wrapper. Ren popped a piece of Shadow-sourced candy into his mouth and said around it, "Want a Life Stone?"

After several seconds of waiting for Ren to spit the candy out and laugh at his own prank, Akechi was forced to accept that Ren was not, in fact, kidding. "You're eating the Shadow trash."

"The edible trash, yeah." Ren cocked his head, sucking noisily on the candy. "Don't you?"

"Why the hell would I eat anything I found in the Metaverse?"

"Because it works. Usually better than food you bring into the Metaverse."

Did the cat initially put him up to it? Surely even Ren hadn't picked up something vaguely food-shaped in a Palace and decided on a whim to put it in his mouth. Akechi realized his own mouth was hanging open and snapped it shut as Ren held out a small, smooth crystal, like what a pomegranate seed might look like if pomegranates were geodes.

On any other day, that might have been the most insane thought to flit through Akechi's head.

"It's got a hard shell," Ren said, "but it's thin. The inside tastes like if meat was fruit."

"Don't be ridiculous." Akechi pinched the Life Stone carefully between two claws and pushed it past his lips before his exhausted brain could talk him out of it. The exterior broke between his teeth like konpeito, releasing a flavor that he couldn't describe as anything but beef jam. Nothing like the texture of jellied meat, not nearly as sweet as a fruit jam, but something he had no other basis of comparison for. He was distracted from how vile it should have tasted by how much less exhausted he felt as it slid down his throat.

Ren swallowed and grinned. "See? Meat fruit."

"Fuck off." Akechi held out his hand without making eye contact. "Give me another one."

Having failed to kill them with a strong Shadow, the Palace changed tacks and tried to annoy them to death with puzzles. At least the puzzle-ridden area was much more lightly patrolled, and the energy from the dubious Metaverse food carried them through the fights that were unavoidable.

Ren pushed a suspicious oversized button before Akechi could stop him, which made an even more suspicious ballista fire a bolt through a stone wall. Sunlight streamed through the hole in a concentrated beam, and even through the red tint of his mask, Akechi could tell that there was something off about it, some sort of discolored glitching glow weaving a mesh around the light. Whatever was wrong with it, after it struck the emblem on a barrier like the one in the main hall, the barrier split vertically and parted at Akechi's approach.

Ren high-fived him. After a baffled pause, Akechi high-fived him back, twice as hard. Nothing the leather of Ren's gloves couldn't handle, judging by the pleased look on his face.

The reflective panel they found in the path of the beam signaled that Sakura's heart operated on a specific sort of video game logic. Tedious but straightforward. Statues of Anubis held glowing orbs that Ren was a bit too quick to snatch without checking for traps, and once again the Palace failed to punish him for it. When the path at last led back to the base of the main hall, to a high ledge that hadn't been visible from below, two pedestals with orb-sized recesses waited next to another reflective panel.

"Hopefully the rest of the Palace is like this," Ren said as he set the second orb in place, tempting fate in a world where fate listened and learned. The panel swung around to direct corrupted sunlight into the barrier's lock.

Don't jinx us wouldn't have been an unreasonable thing to say, but it would have sounded childish, so Akechi held his tongue and leapt down from the ledge. He retraced the familiar path over the pillars while Ren went for another showboating swing on his grappling hook.

Another long stretch of stairs led up to another barrier. Akechi rejected the urge to sprint toward it; better to walk at a deliberate pace, unambiguously opting out of another race where Ren had a head start, then risk stumbling from exhaustion.

Ren didn't run, either. When he reached a landing, he stopped to lean against the wall and study the map while Akechi caught up to him.

"You got your wish, didn't you," Akechi said dryly, only a little short of breath. "How many of these are we going to have to open?"

"One more after this, I think." Ren tapped the next likely sticking point on the map. "Here's hoping it's all puzzles from now on."

With a dismissive tch, Akechi continued climbing the stairs. As he neared the top, iron gates rose away from nooks on either side of the barrier, clearing the way to a decorated door on the left and an almost camouflaged one on the right that made his vision swim when he looked directly at it. Ren rushed past him to the latter, sighing, "Finally."

The headache-inducing effect lessened as Ren pulled a lever to the side of the door, revealing a room that was briefly overlaid with images of posters, books, sacks of trash, and a crowded computer desk. The illusion dissipated between Akechi's blinks.

His confusion must have colored his expression, because Ren said, "It's a safe room. Have you never used one before?"

Posters, books, sacks of trash, and a crowded computer desk added up to a shut-in's bedroom in Sojiro Sakura's house. This room was a hole in the Ruler's cognition, perhaps, where the distortion couldn't remain stable. Akechi squinted, blurring a round vase into a plastic bag stuffed with empty bottles. "I don't take leisurely trips through Palaces."

"Right." Ren's tone was even more difficult to read than usual, and his face wasn't in view as he walked ahead. "Well, we can rest here without having to worry about traps or Shadows. I'm gonna take a nap."

"You're what?" Akechi followed him into the room and watched him ball up his coat into a crude pillow, which he placed at the end of a long, shallow recess in a stone bench. "What do you expect that to accomplish?"

As Ren curled up on his horrible little makeshift bed, he replied, "One time Ann got hit with a sleep ailment in Mementos, and she was so tired we just carried her back to the Mona-bus. When she woke up, she had some of her energy back."

It had been a long time since Akechi failed to evade a sleep skill, incentivized in part by Morgause's violent approach to waking him up and in much larger part by the sting of shame. "If she had any sense, she would have preferred not to be left helpless."

"She wasn't helpless. She had us looking out for her."

"And now you presume that I'll look out for you, rather than slit your throat in your sleep."

"If I couldn't presume that, we wouldn't be here right now." An annoying smirk curled the end of Ren's mouth as he set his mask aside. "I'll look out for you too, if you're tired."

"Unlike you, I have plenty of stamina." Without leaving an opening for Ren to point out the obvious, Akechi added, "Hurry up and pass out. I'm not waiting around here for more than twenty minutes."

A small amused noise was the last one Ren made before his breathing leveled out. It would have been laughably easy for Akechi to slash his throat wide open, or crush his head with any of the heavy objects in the room, or straddle him and slowly choke the life out of him. How dare he trust the word of Akechi, who had lied to him from the moment they met? How dare he put his life in Akechi's merciless hands?

That his foolishness was going to be rewarded, at least in the short term, rankled. Akechi glowered at Ren's sleeping form and wished that Morgause were there to yell at him so that he could yell back at her. He wished that Ren would wake up angry and aggressive and come at him swinging. He wanted to fight something that broke and bled.

Soon enough, Akechi told himself, sitting on the floor to rest his back against the wall opposite Ren's bench. He wanted to crush the parts of himself that felt anything other than impatiently eager. He wanted to drown every part of himself that wanted.

It was quieter in his head when he closed his eyes. He could keep them closed, he decided, for just a few minutes.

Chapter 8

Notes:

Sorry this update took so long! (And IS so long, haha oops.) It's a pretty good fit for Halloween Month, though.

Speaking of which, I am tapping all those suicide- and violence-related tags. Akechi sure is taking Futaba's Palace personally

Chapter Text

Over the last two years, Akechi had let himself become reliant on Morgause as his morning alarm. He didn't have much choice; she established herself as the arbiter of his sleep schedule by turning off his phone whenever he set an alarm to go off earlier or later than she approved. His consciousness took a prickly weight on his arm and a piercing squawk in his ear as its cue to return to him.

So he shouldn't have been surprised that without her, he woke up disoriented with a crick in his neck, a line of drool from his mouth down into his gorget, and no sense of how much time had passed beyond that it had been much longer than twenty minutes.

"Get up," he snapped, just before his gaze landed on Ren sitting at the table in the middle of the room. What looked like the entire collection of pocket trash was spread over it.

Ren waved, bare fingers shiny and dotted with bits of paper. "Good morning. I made us some bombs."

Akechi's irritation vaporized his sleep-haze. "How long have you been awake?"

"I dunno, I didn't check your phone."

"Since you've avoided the point of the question, I'll rephrase it for you. Why the hell didn't you wake me up?"

"You looked like you needed the sleep, and I was busy." Ren held up what looked like a clumsy origami ball made of overlapping parchment scraps. "This'll help us avoid fights."

Grumbling under his breath, Akechi retrieved his phone from the physically nonsensical pocket his suit created for it. Only the Meta-Nav would work as far as apps went, of course, but the clock would still display the right time. Probably. He couldn't remember it ever displaying an obviously wrong time, at least.

For once, he found himself wishing that he was wrong. Otherwise, he really had slept through the remainder of Friday and the first three hours of Saturday.

Nine hours remained before Shido's deadline.

Breathe, he told himself. Think. Time in the Metaverse passed in sync with the real world. If they were about a third of the way through the Palace now, then even if they had to drive across the desert and back again, he was still on track to meet his deadline by a comfortable margin.

Not that he intended to rely on that margin. "Pack up," he told Ren. "We're moving out."

The door opposite the so-called safe room opened on a wide staircase leading up out of sight. Akechi reached the top without breaking a sweat, which he supposed was his consolation prize for having accidentally gotten almost a full night's sleep. Ren kept pace beside him with similar ease.

A long, suspiciously empty hall awaited them. As they moved forward, wary of traps, a pale figure came into view in the center of the floor. Even without the glow of its eyes, it would have been immediately identifiable as the Palace's Ruler. The hem of its long linen skirt hovered ghost-like just above the floor.

"Futaba?" Ren called, coming to a halt and putting his arm out to halt Akechi, as well. "Are you okay?"

The Shadow stared through them both, expression flat. After an uncomfortable silence it said, "You're still here."

"Of course we are. We're not leaving without your Treasure."

Any other Palace Ruler would have been goaded into a fight or gone fleeing toward whatever it was most desperate to protect. This one remained still and silent, without even the subtle motions of breathing. Akechi was growing restless by the time it said, "Follow me," rotated in place to face the passage to its left, and glided swiftly forward.

Ren gave chase and only just skid to a halt before a chasm opened in the floor ahead of him. Akechi grabbed the back of his coat between his shoulders and yanked him backward.

This pit was much shallower than the one had dumped them into the basement full of quicksand. So shallow, in fact, that the gleaming tips of spikes were visible at its bottom. "Still certain that the Ruler doesn't want to kill us?" Akechi asked dryly.

Craning his neck back, Ren pointed up at the ceiling over the pit. "She left us a perfect grappling point, so yeah."

"I wouldn't be so quick to assume that isn't another trap."

"Let's find out." With no hesitation, Ren shot his grappling hook and swung across to the other side, landing neatly on both feet. He turned and waved. "Not a trap."

Infuriatingly, there didn't appear to be another way across. The gap was far too wide to jump. Traversing the wall would have required significant time and energy, if it was even possible. If Morgause had been there—

Akechi shut that thought down hard and fast as Ren swung back across. Without giving him a chance to be smug, Akechi latched both arms around him from behind and said, "Go."

The sensation of clinging through a pendulum arc, with no control over speed or direction and no direct grasp on the line, made Akechi's stomach roil. His heart beat so hard that he was irrationally worried Ren could feel it through multiple layers of fabric. What couldn't have lasted even three full seconds felt interminable.

As soon as Akechi's boots scraped the floor, he detached himself and took a deep breath. Was it too much to hope that there would be no other obstacles that required him to press his body against Ren's? Surely Ren didn't carry all his Phantom Thieves that way, one after another after another. Akechi's irritation receded slightly at the thought of the entire misfit crew dangling from Ren's legs.

Ren was already moving again, following the path Sakura's Shadow had taken. Akechi caught him by the coat again before he could put his foot down near a conspicuously stained section of floor between the pair of columns framing the entrance to a side room. The Shadows patrolling inside didn't seem to have noticed his approach.

"I wasn't going to set it off," Ren said defensively. "I just wanted to get close enough to see how it works."

"There's no need to risk your own body for that." Akechi cupped his gauntlets around his mouth and bellowed, "Oh, guards! We're robbing this tomb!"

Two masked Shadows, one gangly mummy and one four-legged beast, swiveled their heads before making a shrieking beeline for him. Grinning, Akechi dropped into a fighting stance in case the trap was less deadly than advertised.

The beast reached the trap first. A dense row of spears stabbed up through the floor beneath it, hoisting its twitching, tattered remains four meters into the air. Its ashes dissipated as the blades retracted.

Because Shadows were nothing but a patchwork of emotions and impulses, the gangly one kept running and was skewered just as thoroughly. One of the spearheads pierced its palm and posed it in a dramatic swoon in the instant before its form collapsed.

Akechi didn't realize that he had started cackling until he caught Ren watching him with undisguised amusement. Scowling, he turned his face away and tried announcing his presence as an intruder again. No more Shadows came out in response. Pity.

"Assuming no spikes come out of the ceiling," Ren said, "I could probably swing us high enough to get over."

"Let's not trust that assumption."

The hall continued past the trapped room and hooked out of sight, no doubt leading to another gauntlet of platforms and puzzles. Akechi glowered at it as Ren walked past him and said, "Looks like we're taking the long way around."

Predictably, the long way around presented them with more glowing orbs to relocate and more oversized buttons to push. Less predictably, Ren's dubious bombs actually worked; the smoke that burst from them spread at least two meters up and out, so dark and thick it was nearly opaque. The Shadows stilled for as long as the cloud lingered around them, then incuriously resumed their patrols. Absurd, but convenient.

In the absence of fights, the tedious trial-and-error and backtracking grated. What mattered was saving time and energy, Akechi reminded himself, but he still felt his fingers twitch as he watched the Shadows stroll past unscathed.

The buttons manipulated more reflective panels, which directed another concentrated beam of light toward what had to be the next goal. Following it brought them to the entrance of a small room where a single Shadow blocked the route to climb up stacked rows of sarcophagi to reach the beam's level. Odds were good they'd be backtracking through it after hitting another button or pocketing another orb, so when Ren reached for a smoke bomb, Akechi caught his sleeve and said, "Let's just kill this one."

Ren stared at the Shadow thoughtfully for a moment before saying, "It's a strong one."

Narrowing his eyes, Akechi watched it move just like the other mummy-shaped Shadows, identical in size and gait. "What makes you think that?"

"It's red."

Everything was red through Akechi's mask. He pushed it up to see the world through the faint green cast of the pyramid's light instead, but without it nothing was red, including the Shadow. He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"You have to open your third eye to see it. Guess you've only got two."

Ren's eyes glowed red above his cocky grin, bright enough to tint his lashes, just as they had when he spotted a car through a solid wall. So much like a Shadow's eyes, which Akechi was accustomed to seeing filtered through the lenses of his mask. It was just unsettling to see them set in a face that wasn't washed in the same shade.

"You also only have two," Akechi pointed out, "unless you're hiding one under that unkempt mop." He used more force than necessary to flick his forefinger against Ren's forehead, enjoying the thump of metal against thinly skin-padded bone. Before Ren could laugh or complain or surprise him again, he added, "I assume I'm also red to you?"

Ren's eyes gleamed again, brief and bright as fireflies. "Nope. You're Akechi-colored."

That, Akechi decided, was more than enough of that. He dropped his visor back in place and gathered himself to strike as the Shadow shambled closer to where they lurked just outside the doorway. Ignoring whatever Ren was starting to say, he pounced on the Shadow's back with what should have been enough force to drop it. It didn't even teeter, remaining upright as Akechi dug his knees into its sides and clawed at the stubborn edges of its mask.

Ren made this look effortless. Clearly this Shadow's strength extended to the bond of its mask to its face.

The prospect of Ren offering to help gave Akechi the burst of strength he needed to tear the mask free, and he felt its weight dissolved from his hands as he sprang clear of the Shadow's transformation. If it was another haunted coffin, they would blast it apart with wind before it could even think of turning anyone into a mouse.

The shape that solidified was nothing like a coffin, but still a familiar one. After seeing so many statues of Anubis, it was strange to see one made of colorful Shadow-stuff, hovering cross-legged in the air and holding an enormous set of scales rather than standing upright with an ankh in one hand and a glowing orb in the other. Its snout and gaze were both upturned, and it didn't even glance down at its foes as the scales began to shift.

Was it Akzeriyyuth where Akechi had run into one of these? The scales telegraphed something that he couldn't immediately recall, because Morgause had kept track of it. He remembered that the fight was annoying, because he had to change—

Mudoon fizzled harmlessly against his chest, and the memory snapped into place. "It uses bless and curse," he barked at Ren. "Watch the scales."

"Left side curse, got it." Cracking his knuckles, Ren put himself between the Anubis and Akechi, catching a followup Mudoon without flinching. "Stay back. I'll handle this."

The only thing more annoying than the prospect of ebbing and flowing between Robin Hood and Loki was the prospect of letting Ren make a show of dueling the Shadow. In the best-case scenario, the fight would drag on for ages. In the worst case, Ren would lose his rhythm and have the wrong Persona active when an attack hit.

Mudoon and Hamaon disintegrated vulnerable Shadows faster than they could scream. Akechi didn't know what they would do to a flesh-and-blood person, but the thought of Ren crumbling into ash propelled him forward to slam Loki's sword down between the Anubis's pointed ears.

The blow didn't bounce back or slide off, but the Anubis didn't appear particularly bothered by it, either. A gust of wind from Ren's Fuu-ki elicited a similar response. Two more elemental affinities to scratch off the list of potential weaknesses.

The scales tipped toward the right.

Ren rounded on him, tone firm and urgent. "Stay back. You're weak to—"

The stiff outfit that Robin Hood imposed on Akechi fit perfectly, but the moment of transformation still felt like being stuffed into clothes he had outgrown. Every bit of the awkwardness was worth the look on Ren's face when Akechi let Hamaon flare and fade against his body without singeing a thread on his jacket.

"Worry about yourself," Akechi said, tone sharp enough to cut away any anxiety in the instant before Ren shrugged off the second Hamaon.

With a pointed look, Ren whipped his mask off, bringing Leanan Sidhe forward to try Psio, and secured it back on his face before the leftward-tipping scales had stilled. The effect would have been more impressive if half the psionic energies hadn't flickered out on contact with the Shadow's form.

After a few more tense rounds, Ren had run through nearly the entire gamut of elemental skills without striking a weakness. Loki's rain of gunfire accomplished about as much as throwing a handful of pebbles. Bless and curse were both useless, Akechi remembered, so the Anubis must not have had any weaknesses to exploit.

How many of those awful Life Stones did Ren have on hand? If Akechi started furiously whaling away with Laevateinn, how many hits could he land before his legs gave out beneath him?

A little spark of Kouha flew by to plink against the Anubis's knee. "Dammit," Ren muttered, pressing the hand that wasn't holding his mask briefly to his forehead. He was blinking too often, like a child pretending not to be tired. "We need a new plan."

The Anubis thrust useless spears of Makouga at both of them, as if it thought that they couldn't both be immune to bless at the same time. But it didn't really think at all, did it? It was just a clump of stray desires enmeshed in the Palace's security system, looping through a simple script when it sensed intruders. Shift the scales, make two attacks of the corresponding affinity, and repeat, with all the nuanced judgment of a smoke detector.

Hamaon guttered out against Ren's coat as Akechi wrapped Loki's power back around himself. He kept one eye on the shifting scales as he said, "I'll keep hitting it with Laevateinn until it stops moving. Heal me when I go down."

"That's not—hang on." Ren nearly fumbled his mask as he put it back on, and the Mudoon that broke against his back came within a split-second of breaking him, instead. "Let's try a Technical. Hit it with curse as soon as it falls asleep."

The capitalization was audible. This had to be another obscure aspect of the Metaverse that the Phantom Thieves exploited to compensate for their lack of raw power, much like safe rooms. Of course Akechi wouldn't have known about it, no more than he had ever needed to know how to cheat on an exam. "Got it. Hurry up and put it to sleep."

In the narrow gap between the Anubis's two curse attacks, Ren manifested the long-tailed bird that he had used to forcibly heal Akechi. Its beak opened wide to release a barrage of needles. Fast as they flew, there would be no time for Ren to switch Personas before the Anubis struck again, so Akechi snarled and darted between his vulnerable body and the possibility of Mudoon.

But instead of attacking, the Anubis drooped until its long snout rested against its chest. The tiny needles sticking out of its face flickered and vanished. Because the Metaverse was the product of the ridiculous masses' collective unconscious, the Anubis snored once like a small dog.

Only once, before Loki blasted it with Eigaon. Being put to sleep must have inverted something; an attack that should have slid off it ripped right through it, and it collapsed the floor with its scales askew. Akechi tucked all speculation away in the back of his brain as he summoned Loki again to bring its massive sword crashing down.

The Anubis shook its head in baleful silence and began to levitate again, but it rose less than half a meter before there were needles in its face again. Akechi cackled and hit it with Eigaon again, followed by Laevateinn. The searing edge of the blade cleaved through the Shadow to the floor as ashes burst around it.

Darkness pulsed at the edges of Akechi's vision, but he stayed steady on his feet, breathing hard and trying to ignore the gnawing awareness that he had just pushed himself to his limit. When he trusted his voice, he said, "So that's what passes for 'strong' in this Palace."

A beat too slow, Ren rolled his unfocused eyes. His free hand rooted around in one of his pockets and came out with a Life Stone.

Akechi cracked it open between his back molars to minimize the spread of its contents in his mouth. His nose still wrinkled at the taste, but the strain and tremors melted away from the rest of his muscles. His breathing slowed to a steady pace.

Meanwhile, Ren sucked on one of those dubious hard candies, leaning against the nearest wall with his eyes closed. When he opened them, his eyelids still looked heavy, but his gaze was clear and sharp again.

They couldn't afford to trial-and-error their way through any more unfamiliar Shadows if the pool of Ren's stamina was still this shallow. Akechi watched him swallow and said, "That nap of yours wasn't quite as refreshing as you expected, I take it?"

"It was better than nothing." Ren popped a second candy into his mouth. "I can't keep using skills like that, though. No more picking fights."

"We'll be hard-pressed to avoid them once your little smoke bombs run out."

"Time for you to get good at sneaking." Ren laughed as he smoothly evaded the elbow that Akechi thrust toward his ribs. "Save that for the fights we can't avoid."

Akechi rolled his eyes. "I've yet to encounter any Shadow with a weakness to elbows."

"Maybe they would have knocked down that coffin." Less playfully, Ren added, "If we do get attacked by another Shadow we don't know the weakness of, we're jumping straight to Technicals."

"That does seem like the most efficient approach." Akechi took a moment to weigh the desire not to reveal his ignorance against the need to understand the mechanics. The latter won out, but he still aimed for casual curiosity as he asked, "Does putting a Shadow to sleep consistently render it vulnerable to curse skills?"

"Not just curse, pretty much anything takes them down when they're asleep. Psy works for some ailments but I don't remember which ones." Ren scratched the back of his neck. "I'm not usually the one keeping track of this stuff."

"That's unfortunate. I expect you to remember any new combinations we happen to discover."

"That's your job. I'm busy being in charge." Grinning, Ren shot his grappling hook at the top row of sarcophagi.

With a growl, Akechi leapt and nearly seized his ankle before he zipped up out of reach. The boost of energy from the Life Stone fueled a quick ascent that still gave Akechi's mind several seconds to spin.

If he had been in possession of his notebook and the luxury of time, he would have enjoyed discovering which ailments created which weaknesses, then deducing the Metaverse logic behind them. To fall unconscious was to become utterly defenseless, so the general utility of sleep skills tracked. Would psychokinesis wreak havoc on the victim of a mind-altering ailment? Confusion, perhaps—

Didn't matter now, as Akechi reached the top of the wall. Ren was already strolling along below the beam through an open doorway. Beyond lay a long, narrow room with no orbs or buttons, only another reflective panel mounted in front of what looked suspiciously like a blank screen framed by bricks.

Even more suspiciously, a lower stone platform presented a grid of glowing squares labeled with the same symbols as the barriers. Some sort of computer keyboard, perhaps. A cipher puzzle?

Ren didn't hesitate before pressing the square in the lower right. It was possible that his "third eye" also highlighted traps in red and that his confidence wasn't recklessness, but Akechi was unwilling to extend him that much benefit of the doubt.

At first, nothing happened. The floor didn't swing open. No enemy Shadows descended. The reflective panel remained in place, still directing the beam into an unaffected wall. Then there came a noise like an old film projector beginning to spin, and the blank screen flickered to life.

A mural filled the space, appropriate to the ancient Egyptian theming. Akechi pushed his mask up to study it, taking in the scrawled hieroglyphs and colorful figures set against a beige backdrop befitting a stone wall or papyrus scroll. There was the Palace Ruler in profile, one hand cut off razor-neat at the wrist, staring at a man with an owl's head and a black three-piece suit. Two more owl men inexplicably faced the left border of the mural, next to the front half of a large bird whose back half stood near the right side, confirming the nature of the puzzle.

A cipher would have been less of a pain in the ass than figuring out how to manipulate the pieces of the mural into a visually coherent order. Ren tapped at the glowing squares until one of them made a vertical slice light up and appear slightly magnified. Further tapping shifted it to the right, then the left, then upside-down, then let it shrink back as another slice began to glow.

"The top border should be blank on either end," Akechi said, scrutinizing every moment. "Put that bird all the way on the left."

"I got this." Ren highlighted the left half of the bird, inverted it, and swapped it with the slice on its right, which he at least had the sense not to pretend was intentional. His fingers danced a little more slowly and surely over the controls as he righted his target and shuffled it leftward.

For lack of anything better to do, Akechi hunted for meaning in the details of the art. One of the owl men thrust a sheet of paper toward the Ruler with the force of an accusation. The Ruler's face had looked expressionless at a glance, but the longer Akechi focused on it, the more lines appeared around the eyes and mouth like cracks spreading through glass.

The glow of selection suffused it, and the fine lines were smoothed away. Akechi must have imagined them; the art style wasn't nearly intricate enough to portray that level of detail. But when he shifted his attention to the top border, where some sort of bizarre artifact hovered before a line of seated figures holding ankhs, he couldn't shake the impression that the Ruler's face was crumpling into a sob at the edge of his vision.

"So what do you think it means?" Ren asked as he slotted the rightmost slice into place.

The room groaned and shuddered before Akechi could begin to form an answer. Nothing cracked open or toppled over; the floor and walls remained solid; the reflective panel didn't budge. Scarcely a second later, the room fell still again, the only sound the soft whirring of the projector that wasn't really there.

More backtracking, then. Akechi tsked and said, "I don't care what it means. We just need to find whatever changed—"

The room groaned again. This time the sound of stones grinding together subsided into a heavy hum and the clearing of a throat. A man's voice, distorted by its own echoes, came from the mural: "I should never have had Futaba... She was always such a bother."

The voice made no sense. It should have been a woman's, low and tired and frayed by its own barbs, and the air should have smelled like second-hand smoke and sour perfume, and the words should have been, I wish I never met your father.

No. The voice made sense a decade later in an imaginary tomb, where the air was appropriately cool and dry and stale, and one of the men in the mural was reading from a piece of paper. Akechi focused as the voice continued, "It seems you caused your mother a great deal of trouble, Futaba-chan. She must have had some kind of maternity neurosis."

Something like postpartum depression, but so far postpartum that it couldn't be blamed on the initial burst of hormones. Erosion rather than explosion. She could have lived a respectable life if only she'd gotten rid of you.

Another, briefer shuddering of the room made the reflective panel swivel on its base. The beam bored directly into the mural, which vanished like tissue paper in a fire.

Akechi shook his head to clear the afterimage. Ren's voice immediately filled the silence: "Why would anyone do that?"

"Do what?" There was far too much bite in Akechi's voice, but he couldn't get the words out without ripping them loose with his teeth. With a mouth full of ragged edges, he rounded on Ren. "Commit suicide? Leave a note blaming someone for it? There's no point asking why."

Ren's eyes were inscrutable behind his mask. Willing his motions smooth and calm, Akechi dropped his own mask back into place. The world was not improved by the flood of red.

"I meant," Ren said, "why would anyone read that note to her?"

Because she never got the chance to hold it in her own hands. Because she asked over and over and over, why why why why why, and never considered that the answer could be worse than the uncertainty. Because it was better to swallow poison than to starve.

All Akechi's mother left behind had been poison: loose pills in the folds of the sheets, a little liquor in an open bottle, and a note that said, "Mama's sorry, Goro-chan. Be good for Grandma and Grandpa." She didn't have to tell him whose fault it was.

No. He couldn't think about that right now. He didn't have to think about it. Adding emphasis to Ren's question created one that there was a point to asking.

Why would someone read that note to her?

There was no point in pretending that the mural was anything but a traumatic memory reskinned by the Palace. Nothing else would have contained so many stark, incongruous details, nor been solid enough to be broken up and buried. Sakura must have heard those words, framed as her mother's, from what looked very much like a pack of Shido's generic white-collar thugs.

And only Shido would have had the means and motive to arrange it.

Forging a note made sense as a tactic to forestall any investigation into Isshiki's death. What didn't make sense was writing it as a diatribe against Isshiki's child and ensuring that the target heard every word. What reward was worth the risk of needlessly arousing suspicion? Shido enjoyed indulging in cruelty for cruelty's sake, but he was typically shrewder about it.

Perhaps he had simply been power-drunk and reckless. Perhaps he had been driven by his paranoia to crush the implausible threat of the girl knowing enough about her mother's research to piece together the truth and seek revenge. Perhaps Akechi had doomed her when he drew Shido's attention to a loose end that hadn't yet tied itself off.

Akechi himself couldn't be considered a loose end as long as he played the role of a noose.

"Some people inflict suffering for sport," he replied at last. How long had he been quiet, letting thoughts that ultimately didn't matter wear a groove in his brain? "Surely you're aware of that by now."

Ren's face tightened into a more intense version of the expression he wore while fuming about the unjust world, without the softening gloss of his glasses. In the tone he used against Shadows that tried to fuck him over in negotiations, he said, "When this is over, I'm going to track them down and make them pay."

He wouldn't be tracking down anyone. He wouldn't be making anyone pay. He would be one more debit in Akechi's ledger, one more bad debt to be written off as a loss.

Swallowing the half-formed words in his mouth, Akechi walked to the edge of the gap where the mural had been, beneath the pulsing beam. He scarcely confirmed that the main hall was below before leaping down.

When he heard Ren land behind him a second later, he didn't turn or hesitate, only walked up the stairs through the gap where the beam had already blasted open the second barrier.

As Ren had predicted, there was another barrier further up, flanked by a decorative door on the right and the blurry entrance to a safe room on the left. The footsteps behind Akechi sped up, so he halted his ascent and said flatly, "We're not taking another nap."

Already pulling ahead and veering left, Ren turned back with a scowl. "Don't make me play the leader card. It's not as good as leaving the Metaverse to sleep, but—"

"We wasted six hours regaining enough energy to fight one strong enemy."

"Six hours?" Ren got the genuine surprise in his voice and expression under control before asking, "What time is it now?"

"No longer Friday, and I have no intention of being late to school this morning."

The color drained from the visible portion of Ren's face. After a long pause, he pressed his hand to his forehead and sighed. "If you don't kill me, Boss will."

Gallows humor, or was he still clinging to the delusion that he could wiggle out of the rope knotted around his neck? Akechi considered his options before sneering, "Don't you dare throw the duel just to avoid his wrath."

Ren's laugh was difficult to read, especially with his face covered. He was composed again, if still a bit pale, when he met Akechi's smirk with one of his own. "Wouldn't dream of it."

Suddenly and thoroughly irritated, Akechi schooled his mouth back into a disapproving line. "Get the map out. I want to see how much more of this damn Palace we have to slog through."

After a moment's inscrutable pause, Ren unrolled the map against the wall, hands splayed awkwardly until Akechi pressed his thumb to the right edge. With his now-free hand, Ren gestured at a line of connected chambers and said, "This next part looks like it's shorter, which probably means more puzzles or more big mean Shadows. Once we're past the next door, there's a longer section, but that's it."

"When you say 'longer'—"

"Like that basement we had to climb out of. Maybe. I don't think this thing's to scale." Ren traced a finger over a pair of figures drawn in the left margin of the map: a sarcophagus with the Ruler's head, recognizable by its hair and glasses, and what looked like a white-headed Anubis. Tapping the latter, Ren added, "What's up with this guy?"

"With the white head, you mean?" Akechi shrugged. "Visual variety, I'd assume, though it's also possible that Anubis has a near-identical twin in either the original myths or the Ruler's imagination."

Ren rolled his eyes. "I mean, why is Anubis everywhere? The map. The statues. The red Shadows trying to kick our asses. There's other gods, right?"

"Of course there are. You've fought two and absorbed one of them." Not that the baboon Ren had shaken down for candies had radiated divinity. "It's hardly surprising that Anubis is so prominently featured here, given his roles as a funerary god and psychopomp."

"What does he pomp?"

Akechi grinned around a scathing laugh. "Psychopomp, as in a guide of souls. Unlike most of their ilk, Anubis also judges the dead at the end of the journey."

Unacceptably, Ren's attention returned to the map. He kept his eyes on the Sakura-headed sarcophagus as he asked, "How?"

Akechi turned on the full force of dramatic recitation: "According to the Book of the Dead, Anubis weighs the hearts of the departed to determine whether they deserve to spend eternity in paradise or be eaten by a monster with a crocodile's head."

This appropriate level of theatrics got Ren's eyes back where they belonged, briefly wrinkled at the edges in amusement. "What's the goal weight for a heart?"

"Lighter than a feather."

"That's a pretty unrealistic standard."

"Indeed, it's meant to be." The last article Akechi read on the subject had made him grind his teeth against every implication. He could still taste the bitterness rising in the back of his throat as he kept talking: "That's why The Book of the Dead contains spells that can suppress evidence during the trial. Specifically, the heart itself can be silenced while the soul claims innocence. That part is remarkably realistic, isn't it? Even the gods don't care if vile men escape justice by gaming the system."

Ren's gaze sharpened; Akechi could almost feel the hooks of it catching on his own eyes. Whatever Ren was turning over in his head went unsaid as he shifted a hand to Akechi's side of the map. He dragged Akechi's gaze along with his own to focus on the ragged hole where a monster's head should have been.

"Better keep an eye out for that loose crocodile head," Ren said after an uncomfortably long pause. His blink broke the connection. Akechi let the right side of the map fall, and Ren rolled it neatly back up.

The door from the hall opened almost directly upon a stone tablet with glowing text. To Akechi's lack of surprise, it sounded like a diegetic hint from a video game, worded as vaguely and mysteriously as possible to distract from how little sense its presence made in the fictional world. At least another tedious puzzle wouldn't be as draining as a fight against another unfamiliar Shadow.

Ren read the text out loud with the gusto of a cartoon wizard: "'When red and blue align, an illusion will rise. Only proper guidance shall form a path.' Can you even see blue through that mask?"

"Since you enjoy putting yourself in charge so much, I'll graciously allow you to be in charge of noticing colors." Akechi advanced past him and peeked around the corner, into a narrow passageway where a Shadow was on patrol. "I don't care if that one's not red," he added. "We're not fighting it."

One of Ren's little paper bombs sailed overhead and burst into smoke around the Shadow. As they sneaked past, Akechi noted that Ren already had another bomb ready in his hand. Hopefully he had enough in his pockets to cover the rest of the Palace's close quarters.

"You could put your other mask on," Ren said once they were out of the Shadow's patrolling range. "Doesn't all that red give you a headache?"

Now that he knew Akechi's change of outfit corresponded to a change of affinities, Ren no doubt suspected that it also corresponded to a change of Persona. He could go right on suspecting. If he ever saw Robin Hood, it would be in the same instant that a surprise Kougaon struck his weakness and laid him out for the kill.

Akechi smiled pleasantly and replied, "Not at all. I'm quite used to it by now."

Whatever line of questioning Ren meant to pivot to was cut off as they followed the path down a level and came face-to-face with Sakura's Shadow. Its feet touched the floor this time, and its usually blank face was subtly furrowed.

"You're late," it said, voice still low and distant but ever so slightly less flat. "What took you so long?"

Akechi set his hand on his hip. "This would go much quicker if you dispensed with the tedious traps and puzzles."

The Shadow's glowing eyes narrowed behind its glasses as it stared at Akechi. "You don't sound like any of them. Who are you?"

Just how many of the Phantom Thieves' identities had Sakura uncovered? If she knew their voices, she must have been eavesdropping on them somehow. Perhaps she was doing more than playing games when she hunched over her keyboard all day. Akechi tucked his irrelevant speculation away and replied, "I'm here to steal your heart, just like he is. Anything beyond that is none of your business."

"I didn't invite you here." Frowning, the Shadow shifted its attention to Ren. "I don't want you here, either. This is my tomb. All I want is to rest in peace."

Ren shook his head. "If you really believed that, you wouldn't have reached out to me."

The Shadow spun on its heel and walked up the slope that had been on its right, hair and fabric billowing behind it as if it were advancing into a strong wind. It moved faster than the speed and length of its stride should have allowed.

Like an idiot, Ren started to give chase, so Akechi caught him by the coattails. An enormous glowing ball rolled out of the wall in the Shadow's wake and came hurtling down the slope toward them. They darted back around the corner and watched as the ball pocketed itself in a hole at the base of the slope.

"That was a close one," Ren said, before heading right back up the slope. Akechi stayed put at the corner, arms crossed and foot tapping. It didn't take long for Ren to come sprinting back down, less than a meter ahead of another giant ball by the time he leapt to safety.

As Ren doubled over to catch his breath, Akechi said dryly, "Do you suppose the third time's the charm?"

"As long as it's your turn to try." Still panting, Ren raised his head and squinted across the path of the trap, eyes aglow. "There's a hole big enough to crawl through in that wall."

The hole was much quicker to crawl through than the metal shaft leading into Kaneshiro's Palace had been, but it was also much tighter of a squeeze. The irritation of the prongs of Akechi's mask scraping against the rough stone above him was surpassed only by the irritation of Ren's ass fully obstructing his view.

The assless view, when Akechi finally got to take it in, was an obvious puzzle room that irritated him even more. More riddles, more codes, more big stone buttons for Ren to recklessly push. Holographic projections that Ren was quick to point out were blue. Tedious puzzles that any idiot with a functional short-term memory would have been capable of solving.

At least the minimal focus required to remember five numbers at a time was enough to keep Akechi's brain from spiraling into a childish fantasy that his mother's note had been forged just like Isshiki's.

Because of course it hadn't. There had been nothing ambiguously accidental about the circumstances of her death. There had been no monster present for her to fight, then beg not to make an orphan of her son. There had been no fight left in her at all after so many listless days and jagged nights.

"You can't turn that one off by staring at it," Ren called from the platform with the big pushable button, where he had been calling out directions that Akechi didn't need. "It's red," he added, as Akechi scowled and smacked the glowing control panel.

A door opened on the far side of the room. Two more smoke bombs cleared the winding path beyond it to a dead-end chamber with a reflective panel and a blank screen.

"Another of these?" Akechi kept his voice contemptuously flat. "I'll let you handle it. You managed well enough with the last one."

Ren's expression was annoyingly solicitous, as if Akechi had just confessed a weakness. Before he could say anything, Akechi added sharply, "Unless you're not up to the challenge."

"No, I got it," Ren said, activating the controls without looking down at them. The projector noise started up. "You just stand there and look pretty."

Akechi raised his middle finger before crossing his arms.

This time the mural had been more thoroughly cut and shuffled, but Akechi understood what he was looking at as soon as he registered the pieces of a body sliced up and scattered around a crosswalk light and police tape. The bisected image of the Ruler made his stomach twist.

Shido couldn't have arranged for Isshiki's daughter to be watching when her mother died. At the time, they hadn't known how much of a delay there would be before the mental shutdown took effect. They hadn't even known whether the victim would shuffle on like a zombie or fall instantly comatose. The car accident had been a stroke of cruel luck, which was indistinguishable from fate, which was just another word for whatever god or demon had invested in Akechi's cataclysmic potential.

In a simpler world, Akechi would have vomited out his unease in a dark corner and moved on, focused and empty. Instead he had to stand still, tasting bile and uncomfortably conscious of whether the angle of his hips came off as pretty, as the husk of Wakaba Isshiki was reconstructed in the center of the mural.

Tumbling toward the hood of the car, trapped in an indeterminable state between falling and leaping, between intention and accident. It was all a matter of perspective, just like the diagonal lines in the background that were the rays of the sun at the top of the mural and the stripes of a crosswalk below. Details too vivid to fade and too muddled to clarify. The folds of the sheets had been ripples around a body in a frozen moment, not dead but suspended, and she would blink and breathe as soon as time started flowing again—

The click of the final piece into place heralded the noisy shaking of the room, which knocked apart the thoughts clumping in Akechi's brain. The growl of stone against stone spiraled up into a crackling groan.

Static growled under what sounded like a beast mimicking human speech: "Fffff. Fffu. Fffutabaaaaa."

"Don't like that," Ren muttered.

A rattling breath made the entire room throb like a lung. "Yyyouu. Arrrrrrrre." The growl spiraled up higher into a wildcat's roar, a primal panic-inducing noise that made Akechi's nape tighten. He was still fighting the muscle tension when the beam burned the mural away.

It was impossible not to think about the headless monster on the map.

Ren broke the silence without looking away from the hole where the mural had been: "Why would she do that in front of her own kid?"

Because she had expected the landlord to find her, unaware that her son would get home first. Because by the end, hoarding pills was the closest she came to thinking about the future.

"If she truly hated her daughter," Akechi said, voice pressed thin by the tightness in his throat, "she might have done it out of spite."

Ren's gaze flicked to him and hooked in. "Are you okay?"

In a laudable show of restraint, Akechi kept his arms crossed and did not lunge for Ren's throat. "I've been in the Metaverse for nearly ten hours without weapons, supplies, or access to sufficient recovery skills. Under the circumstances, I'm doing remarkably well."

Akechi's restraint had not extended to the muscles of his fingers, which he didn't realize until he followed Ren's gaze to his flexing gauntlets. Gritting his teeth, he dug his claws into his arms.

"These murals seem to be getting to you, is all." Ren's voice remained maddeningly even, like a steady hand baiting an already set trap. "If you want to sit out the next one—"

"Worry about your own feelings," Akechi snapped. "I'm more than capable of handling mine."

"Okay." Ren's tone was mild, but his gaze didn't soften at all. "So how do you know Futaba?"

The tip of a claw pierced through Akechi's suit into his skin. He needed to get himself under control; he couldn't let himself bleed when Ren was already sniffing for signs of weakness. "What the hell are you talking about? I've never met her. Assuming you didn't give yourself brain damage with those dubious crafting supplies, you should be able to recall that her Shadow didn't recognize me."

"That's not what I asked."

Claiming to have heard about her from Sae would have been a perfectly plausible explanation if Akechi hadn't already explicitly claimed otherwise, or if inhaling sticky corpse residue really had been enough to muddle Ren's brain. Any other claim would be undercut by how long Akechi hesitated before making it. Better to sidestep and go on the offensive.

Setting that hand that had drawn blood from his arm on his hip, he said flatly, "I suppose it's flattering that you've mistaken my powers of observation and deduction for foreknowledge, but we've already wasted more than enough time on this irrelevant tangent of yours. You can wallow here in your imagination for as long as you like. I'm going to continue making progress in this Palace with or without you."

Ren held his hands up at shoulder-level. "Okay, okay. You can just say it's a touchy subject."

Akechi swallowed a growl as he leapt down into the main hallway.

To his credit, Ren didn't even suggest entering the safe room to the right of the next barrier. The last one, if the map could be trusted. Even if it couldn't, the cognitive world could be trusted to follow patterns, which meant one final gauntlet of puzzles and traps, one last suppressed memory to forcibly reconstruct, and then there would be only the deeper and stranger violation of changing a heart.

Then two deaths, with the promise of satisfaction in between. And three lies to rehearse for the satisfaction of others: one for Morgause, one for Shido, and one to cover every facet of the Detective Prince that had failed to perform to standards. My apologies. I've taken care of the obstacles that impeded me, so I can assure you that this won't happen again. There's no longer anything in the way of me doing my best work.

His hands would be steady again, once he had gloved them in blood.

The door to the next section of the Palace opened on a vast chamber with what looked like natural light pouring in from gaps in the impossibly high ceiling to illuminate two enormous, unfinished stone statues, which flanked a passage leading to a pit wide and deep enough to consume them both. Staring down into it made Akechi's gut flutter queasily. He reminded himself that everything in a Palace was uncomfortably metaphorical, and it didn't matter, because it was always someone else's metaphor.

"I've got a better hole over here," Ren called from his left, at once breaking the silence between them and replacing all of Akechi's internal discomfort with simmering irritation.

There was, of course, a literal hole, roughly the size of the one Akechi had suffered the indignity of squeezing through earlier, and Ren was, of course, wearing the expression of someone equally eager to elicit a laugh, a groan, or a threat.

Akechi gave him a glower and shoved ahead of him through the narrow tunnel. When he emerged on the other side after an unpleasantly tight turn, Ren slipped past him to smash a nearby canopic jar.

Looming over him as he dug through dried brittle guts, Akechi said, "You haven't got enough trash in your pockets already?"

"We're running low on smoke bombs." Ren blew the dirt off a little screw-top jar before adding, "This part of the map is huge. Either I make more, or we have to start fighting Shadows again. I dunno about you, but I'm running on fumes."

Dealing with Shadow efficiently required hitting weaknesses or pulling off the one Technical maneuver that they could be confident would work, both strategies that relied on Ren's stamina. "And the edible Shadow trash?"

"I gave you the last Life Stone. The good news is I still have two Soul Drops. The bad news is that's about enough juice for four sleep skills."

Akechi peered around the corner. There were no Shadows immediately visible, but the area appeared to be a maze of twisty little passages that would no doubt be rife with sentries. Too many of the Pyramid's denizens resisted curse damage to make Eigaon a viable attack against anything that wasn't asleep, and he only had so many Megidolaons left in him.

Shaking down Shadows for items was still an option, but it would be a matter of luck if Ren got anything that replenished as much energy as he expended in the process, let alone something that put him ahead. Nothing about the last twenty-four hours of Akechi's life suggested that luck was on his side.

After cursing under his breath, Akechi said, "How long does it take you to make those bombs?"

"I'm slower without my tools, but I should be able to make enough in less than an hour." Ren's eyes glowed red before he slinked past Akechi toward the next intersection. "Plus however long it takes to gather materials."

In a better world, Akechi would have been spending the next hour asleep before the infallible alarm that was Morgause woke him up to squeeze in a bike ride before his Saturday classes. That bike ride had long been a lost cause, and the window of possibility to make it to any of his classes was steadily narrowing.

He still had more than seven hours until Shido's deadline. He was still on track to meet it.

"We'll make a loop and head back to that safe room," he decided aloud. "If you don't have the materials you need by then, I'll gather them while you work. No sense wasting time."

They sneaked through a narrow little labyrinth, moving in silence punctuated by the explosive shattering of jars, Akechi keeping watch while Ren dug through useless remains for useful trash. A looping path let them avoid a pair of patrolling beast Shadows without wasting supplies. In a rare moment of convenience, crawling through another hole to reach a cluster of jars brought them to the hazy entrance to another safe room.

Ren emptied his pockets onto the table inside, then flicked his fingers through a dextrous little dance to sort the materials. The pile of screw-top jars dwarfed the others. "Four more pieces of parchment should do it. If you see any cork bark, grab that too. I can use it to make wind bombs in case we run into any more of those coffin monsters."

As if Akechi had intended to leave behind anything in a canopic jar that wasn't desiccated tissue. He turned to the door, only to be startled by Ren rushing over to push a shiny ball of parchment into his hand.

"In case of emergency," Ren said, taking the audacious liberty of folding Akechi's armored fingers over it. "Try not to have any emergencies, though."

Akechi huffed, eloquently, and headed off to hunt.

The stock of nearby canopy jars was depleted quickly, with precious little useful junk to show for it, so Akechi scouted ahead as far as the Shadows remained sparse, pushing a few buttons along the way with the reckless panache of Ren and suffering no ill effects for it. He avoided thinking about the impossible pockets that engulfed the scraps of cork and silk he picked up, as well as the orb that would surely be needed later. Parchment remained elusive.

At the edge of the reasonable limits of solo exploration, he resigned himself to turning back. He had retraced most of his steps when one of the beast-shaped Shadows trotted past the intersection he was lurking behind. Just one Shadow, separated from any backup. Easy prey, under any other circumstances.

Then again, why not under the present circumstances? The four-legged beasts had consistently been unmasked as Thoths. Weak little pests with no bless skills. Easily exterminated in Mementos by two good swings of a sword or a single gunshot. Ren had bullied candy out of one and knocked another down for Akechi to rip apart with his claws, then been delighted when the latter left behind a sheet of parchment under a little pile of yen.

Akechi's pent-up aggression was beginning to eclipse his exhaustion.

After a final glance to make sure there truly wasn't a pack lurking nearby, Akechi leapt on the Shadow from behind, ripped the mask up and off, and sank his claws into the revealed Thoth before it had even fully reformed.

Sharp as they were, the blades of his gauntlets were poor substitutes for a saw-toothed sword. The Thoth squirmed free, squealing indignantly, and held aloft its giant book to fire a blast of nuclear energy. Nothing life-threatening, but it stung more than it should have, and Akechi was still off-balance from it when he swiped at the Thoth and missed.

Amid grunts and squeals the book rose again. Akechi braced himself, both for the pain and the likelihood he'd have to burn energy on at least an Eigaon, but all he felt was an electric surge of rage. Fucking careless—

"Stupid piece of shit!" he screeched, charging so low to the ground that he was almost on all fours. The Thoth scurried backward with its book held up to shield its face. Pathetic. Akechi raked his claws through the binding and scattered pages everywhere.

Howling, the Thoth grasped wildly and caught the end of the belt on Akechi's upper right arm with one of its feet. He growled and slammed its body against the floor, hard enough to send its hat flying and produce an echoing crack. The Thoth wailed like a siren.

Between giddy cackles, Akechi seized enough breath to tell it, "Yes! Keep screaming!"

Pity it went silent after Akechi tore through its face. His claws gouged the stone floor as the Shadow collapsed disappointingly into ash. His blood was still an insatiable fire in his veins.

He needed more to kill. He needed—

The ailment wore off just in time for Akechi to stop himself from shredding the parchment that appeared. Panting, he tucked it away and couldn't decide whether he was more relieved that Morgause hadn't been present to watch him lose control, or more disappointed that Ren hadn't. Maybe Ren would finally have understood what kind of monster he had thrown in with.

The adrenaline crash kept Akechi a little shaky as he got to his feet, hand against a wall for support. His shoulders jumped toward his ears when the Ruler's voice said from directly behind him, "Where's the other one?"

He whipped around, forcing his shoulders down and back, and struggled to even out his breathing as he glowered at the small figure invading his personal space. Irritation honed the edge of, "Producing countermeasures against your bullshit. You'll see him again soon enough."

The Ruler cocked its head and made no move to back away. "You're afraid of me," it said, wildly incorrectly. "Why?"

"You're mistaking exasperation for fear. I've been slogging my way through your distorted heart for hours while you subject me to your ridiculous little puzzles. All I want is to see the end of it."

"Then leave." The Ruler finally drifted backward, bare feet dragging lines through a thin layer of sand. Agitation filled its hollow voice as it continued, "I don't want you here. Stop digging up my memories. It hurts. I don't want to remember. I don't want to live as my mother's killer."

"You didn't kill your mother." The words tumbled out before Akechi could weigh them, but what did it matter if he said too much to a doomed Shadow? It wasn't as if the real Sakura could hear him. It wasn't as if it mattered if she could. "But I know who did."

The Ruler's mouth flattened into a line, trembling at the corners.

"Why did you trust the men who said it was your fault?" Akechi pressed on despite the frantic part of his brain telling him to stop. "You swallowed the blame without question, and then you built a Palace out of the guilt that should have been hung around the neck of the bastard who deserves it. While you've been burying yourself, he's been running free. Laughing. And you haven't done a damn thing to stop him."

The still air of the pyramid gusted around the Ruler into Akechi's face, so sudden that he didn't have time to close his mouth against a blast of sand. As he sputtered, the Ruler rose two meters into the air, eyes bright as coals, hair and robes whipping around the frail body.

He realized just how badly he had fucked up when the Ruler vanished and thick Shadow-stuff bubbled up between the bricks of the floor, replicating the massive, lopsided form of the Shadow that transformed into a coffin.

Akechi hurled the smoke bomb at it and backed away toward the path leading to the safe room. Unlike every other Shadow, it didn't freeze as soon as the darkness descended. Instead it roared and came leaping out of the smoke with ground-shaking force, eyes glowing like targeting lasers. Akechi cursed and took off at a sprint.

The hallways shook around him with each of the Shadow's thundering footfalls, impossibly fast for something so huge and misshapen. He could hear its mask scraping against the low ceiling.

As soon as he rounded the corner into the chamber with the safe room, Akechi threw himself toward the lever beside the shimmering haze of the door. Something caught a tattered piece of fabric at the bottom of his suit. It tore loose, but not before jerking him backward.

The lever was out of reach. The Shadow slammed a massive fist into the space his foot had occupied until a split-second before. With a wild roar of his own, Akechi spun and launched himself at the Shadow's mask, hooking his claws around the edges. The moment he bought himself as the Shadow transformed was all he needed to get the door open, rush inside, and slam it shut behind him.

Unmasked and ungloved, Ren looked up from the table in the middle of the room and blinked. "Everything okay?"

A breathless titter escaped Akechi before he could catch it. After clearing his throat, he tossed a stripe of cork bark in front of Ren and said, "We're going to need those wind bombs."

"Shit, you ran into another of those coffin monsters?"

"Actually, it ran after me." To keep his hands busy and his eyes off Ren, he began transferring everything else he had gathered to the tabletop, cork and silk and not enough parchment. "Your smoke bomb didn't even faze it. It's right outside the door now."

As he set the orb down, Ren asked, with a thin edge of suspicion, "Where did it come from?"

"The Palace's Ruler summoned it." Out of excuses to avoid eye contact, Akechi looked up and did his best not to appear defensive. "Before you make any assumptions, let me be clear that I in no way attacked the Ruler. It was already antagonistic when it approached me."

Ren frowned. "Don't call her an 'it.'"

"I was referring to her Shadow. Don't conflate it with Sakura herself."

Ren crossed his arms.

A debate for another time, Akechi wanted to tell himself, but there wouldn't be another time, would there? He took a deep, centering breath. "Fine. She was antagonistic. I'm not going to argue semantics with you when there's a Shadow we should be killing."

"It's not the semantics I'm arguing about," Ren replied stiffly, but he did uncross his arms. "Anyway, we're not killing anything until I make those bombs."

Akechi flicked a bit of cork at him.

Hands conspicuously still idle, Ren said, "I'll get started as soon as you tell me the rest of what happened. So she was antagonistic. How'd you react?"

"I told her that she didn't kill her mother."

"And?"

"She was unreceptive."

You're so full of shit, Ren's face said, but his mouth only let out a resigned sigh. Akechi had brought back a much larger problem, and he had enough sense to prioritize it.

"How long is this going to take?" Akechi asked.

Ren reached across the table to tap the back of his left gauntlet. "Take those off so you can help and it'll go faster."

The tedious attachment of little tin clasps to slippery slivers of cork was more challenging than the subsequent fight. Tedium didn't drain Akechi's energy like Laevateinn did, though. The new bombs meant that Ren didn't have to burn himself out with Garulas, but someone still had to hit the coffin hard and fast while it was down. Akechi's insistence that he could keep going afterward was undermined by his inability to stand without swaying.

He and Ren compromised on a half-hour nap, for which he set an alarm with the volume on his phone cranked up as high as it would go. Siren noises and an aggressive vibration pattern filled in well enough for Morgause. When he woke up feeling more refreshed than he should have, he raised his mask just long enough to confirm that Ren looked a bit too pale.

Idiot. How many uses of potentially tide-turning skills had he blown on what must have been a surreptitious Diarama? Akechi itched to start another fight, with his words or his fists or both. See how Ren liked having sponsored his own ass-kicking.

But what would come of it except wasting more of the little time they had left?

Akechi held his tongue, loosened his fists, and struggled not to count down the minutes in his head as he and Ren skulked their way deeper into the pyramid. Another long stretch of memorizing patrol patterns, pressing unmarked buttons, and redistributing orbs to Anubis statues. More squeezing through tunnels. Crossing over bridges made of impossible load-bearing light was new, and Ren made sure Akechi knew the glow was a vivid green.

The Shadows seemed more alert now, a little quicker on their feet and a little more sensitive to the sound of intruding footsteps. When Ren calculated how many more smoke bombs he'd need, had he accounted for the possibility of more aggressive Shadows? He seemed more inclined to wait for a narrow gap in a patrol than to throw a bomb and hurry past, which Akechi doubted was the result of his having suddenly become more patient.

How many, Akechi tried not to wonder, did he have left?

Eventually the path led them back to an upper level of the chamber at the beginning of the area with the enormous statues. The familiar beam they had been redirecting lit up small platforms even higher above the floor, suspended together in a spiderweb of more solid light. Once again they needed to use Ren's grappling hook to make progress, which meant clinging tight enough to him to feel him breathe. Akechi tried, and failed, to tell himself that the indignity wasn't too steep a price to pay for the lack of Shadows in the room.

At the end of the path, inevitably, was another blank screen and another glowing control panel.

"I meant it earlier," Ren said, instead of just getting down to business. "You don't have to be here for this."

Which would be worse, Akechi wondered, being alone with his thoughts or attracting the Palace's Ruler in its new avenging angel mode? Feet planted firmly, he said, "And I meant it when I told you to worry about yourself. Either get to work on that puzzle or get out of the way so I can."

Visibly displeased, Ren nevertheless activated the controls. The image that appeared was more chaotically jumbled than the last one, bodies chopped and scattered amid fragments of furniture and decorative flourishes. The Ruler's disembodied head hung upside-down in the top-right corner.

Ren was smart enough to start by aligning legs with the feet at the bottom of the mural. As usual, the pieces glowed as he manipulated them, but unlike before, the light didn't fade after he slotted them into place. Instead the images flickered in and out as if over a bad connection, all of sync with each other.

Akechi removed his mask to confirm his hunch that the pieces were flickering the solid blue of a screen complaining of no input signal. The reality turned out to be worse, a stroboscopic nightmare of hyper-saturated colors that had all looked the same through his red lenses. He secured his mask again before turning to Ren, who squinted and winced every time he looked up from the controls.

"Move," Akechi said, giving Ren a shove instead of a chance to comply on his own. "Just imagine the mess you'd be in now if you'd succeeded in banishing me to the hallway."

Ren closed his eyes with a rueful laugh. "I can't believe colors betrayed me."

Someone in his position should have been living in constant anticipation of betrayal, but it was a bit late now for him to start, so Akechi only made a derisive noise and got to work.

Confusing elements of the image clarified into an office chair and desk on one side, and a computer flat on the floor on the other. In the middle stood Isshiki with a stack of papers in her arms, head twisted to backward to look at the Ruler tugging on the hem of her shirt. Strange, Akechi thought; the Ruler had been the largest figure in the first mural, and roughly the same size as Isshiki in the second. Why was each iteration smaller than the last? If a fourth mural existed, would it diminish the Ruler into a speck lost in the sand?

If a fourth mural existed, he would have much more pressing things to worry about. Akechi slotted the last piece of a decorative border into place and braced himself for another upsetting auditory experience as the room began to shake.

The voice this time was Sakura's, small at first but louder and increasingly distorted as the flickering of the mural sped up: "Mom... I'm tired of eatingggg dinner allll alone. I'mmm tiiireddd. Mommmmm..."

With a high-pitched hum, the image on the mural was washed out entirely by a glow so bright that Akechi had to look away. New noises crackled up from beneath the hum, like heavy wheezing breaths. No, not just breaths—mangled fragments of speech piecing themselves together into a voice.

Isshiki's voice.

"Don't be so selfish! You know I'm working—" The voice broke down again, dissolving into echoes, lower and lower until they met the rising growl of the headless beast: "You know—Yyyou know—Youuuu knowwwww—"

The light and noise reached a crescendo as the frame around the mural began to shake even more violently than the rest of the room. Ren's hand closed around Akechi's arm, to anchor or be anchored, but Akechi was distracted from it by the spontaneous collapse of the mural and the entire wall behind it. Only after the shaking stopped did the reflective panel swivel and direct its beam through the ragged hole.

"That was different," said Ren, master of the obvious. Akechi pulled out of his grasp and put a good meter between them, breathing hard. When Ren turned away from the rubble, his eyes were open and skewer-sharp. "What really happened with you and Futaba?"

"Like I told you before, I pissed her off, which seems to have further destabilized her. The details aren't relevant to the task at hand."

"The task at hand is changing her heart, and her heart just freaked out and blew up a wall. The details are relevant."

There was nothing to gain from having this conversion. Time was ticking inexorably down. But Ren was too stubborn to budge until he was either satisfied or decisively fended off, so Akechi said, "I expressed my disapproval of her decision to accept the blame and wallow in guilt. Perhaps she's begun externalizing her anger as a result."

Ren sighed heavily and put his hands over his face. When he lowered them, his expression was more incredulous than furious. "Why did you do that?"

Satisfying him further was out of the question. Better to crack a whip against the nose he was poking into Akechi's business. Akechi let a snarl slip out before replying, "Because these murals have indeed been 'getting to' me, as you put it. Suffice it to say that there's a reason I've never discussed my family situation with you, and I'm certainly not going to start now."

For an uncomfortably protracted moment, Ren's poker face slipped, letting something almost like pity tug at his eyes and mouth. "Wow," he said at last. "Okay. I guess she does look a little like you."

"You guess—what the fuck." Akechi spat out an incredulous laugh, thick with the venom that had been eating its way up his throat. "I was implying that Sakura's situation has enough in common with my own to dredge up unpleasant memories, not whatever insane soap opera storyline you're making up in your head based on your apparent need to exchange your fake glasses for prescription ones."

"My mistake." At least Ren's skin-crawling concern had been legible; he was impossible to read now, and his tone offered no insights as he turned to the hole in the wall and said, "We should stay on guard. There's no telling how else her emotions are affecting her Palace."

Akechi ground his teeth as he watched Ren jump down ahead of him, which he managed much more smoothly than that spectacularly idiotic leap of logic he had just attempted. The stress and exhaustion of their long sojourn in the Metaverse must have been wearing on Ren more than he was letting on. How else could the same person who clocked Akechi's subtle switch to his non-dominant hand for billiards have just displayed such poor powers of observation? How dare he?

That Akechi was wasting energy being upset must have been the result of his own stress and exhaustion. He needed to put it out of his mind, but as he followed Ren up the stairs of the main hall, the tiredest, stupidest part of his brain kept tripping over the blanks in Sakura's records where her father's name should have been.

Isshiki had never married. The man who added her daughter to his koseki wouldn't have been vulnerable to Sae's threats if he had been able to claim her as his biological child. There were any number of reasons why Isshiki might not have disclosed, or even been certain of, her daughter's parentage. Plenty of deadbeat men sired children and never acknowledged them.

What the hell did Ren know about Isshiki, or Sakura, or Shido, or any of it? Nothing. He was drawing arbitrary squiggles instead of connecting dots. He was trying to sneak in his own dots. He was planning ahead for a fight he knew he couldn't win, trying to rattle Akechi down to his level.

Akechi dug his claws into his right thigh to jolt his focus back to the present.

At the top of the stairs, scarcely a meter beyond where the barrier had been, the hallway ended at a stone wall, into which was set an open archway. Judging by the piles of rubble at the base of the arch, littered with shreds of caution tape and warning signs, there had been some sort of barrier in place here, too.

"Looks like I saved us another headache by pissing her off," Akechi said, slipping past Ren to space beyond the arch. A long vertical shaft extended above a small, glowing floorspace, with a panel in the center that he hoped meant they were entering an elevator.

Ren reached past him to push a button. As the floor groaned and began to rise, Ren said, "Save the gloating until we see what's next."

They emerged into a space far vaster than the room with the giant statues, and infinitely more chaotic. Glowing error screens covered the walls, angling dizzily up to what had to be the point of the pyramid. Judging from Ren's squint, Akechi's mask was shielding him from more garish color flashes. Platforms and sarcophagi floated impossibly overhead at irrational angles. The sounds of footsteps suggested patrolling Shadows, but they were difficult to pick out under a constant, droning whine like the noise from the car radio.

"This has to be that weird bit at the end of the map. Just a little farther now." Ren craned his neck back, one hand shielding most of his view while the other flicked its forefinger between platforms. "I think I can grapple us up past most of this."

With difficulty, Akechi forced his arms around Ren instead of pressing his hands to his ears. "Then hurry up and do it."

The route Ren chose had him parkouring off sarcophagi, latching his hook to the next hold in the same stomach-turning moment that he began to tumble back down. Akechi clung tight enough to leave holes in his coat and fantasized around strangling him with his own grappling line.

They landed on solid ground directly in front of a door without attracting a single Shadow's attention. Akechi pulled the lever to open it without acknowledging Ren's cocky little bow.

The room beyond was dark and musty, lit only by the glow from beneath an unadorned sarcophagus. Akechi raised his mask to see better and found the light an especially sickly greenish gold, scarcely bright enough to pick out the walls and low ceiling of the cramped space.

"Tada," Ren said, slapping a hand on the sarcophagus lid. "The Treasure's in here."

Akechi nodded, intrigued despite himself. "I recall you telling the Ruler that we wouldn't be leaving without it. I take it that stealing this Treasure is the key to changing her heart?"

"Yeah, a Treasure's the thing a Ruler's desires got distorted around. Once it's gone, they have to face reality."

"By which you mean, you brainwash them into falling in line with the social order."

Ren's eyes narrowed. "We make them feel the weight of their crimes. They're the ones who made that weight so heavy."

A child's reasoning. Had Akechi been any less acutely aware of his deadline, he would have dug his teeth in and torn Ren's self-righteousness to shreds. As it was, he replied, "But in Sakura's case, you expect that weight to become lighter?"

"Exactly. Right now, her distortion is making her want to die because of something that wasn't even her fault."

Because the certainty that someone else was to blame would make everything all right, of course. It wouldn't become a hot coal in her stomach, driving her forward as it burned her alive for fuel. She wouldn't stumble every time it guttered at a reminder that she needn't have been at fault to have been a contributing factor.

Akechi couldn't keep his expression stiff, so he let contempt shape it as he hooked a hand around the edge of the lid. "Then what are we waiting for? Let's steal it."

The lid didn't budge. Akechi was attempting to put his entire body into lifting it when Ren said, "The Treasure won't take a physical form until the Ruler feels threatened enough. We still need to give Futaba a calling card."

"So as I deduced, they aren't just for show." Akechi scraped a claw spitefully across the lid, to no effect. "Surely it would be more efficient in this case to draw out the Ruler again and threaten her directly."

"Too risky. If the real Futaba isn't on guard, there's no telling if it'll work. You might just make the Palace worse again."

Akechi crossed his arms with a sneer. "So how do you propose we get a calling card into the real Sakura's hands, exactly?"

"Usually Fox makes them—"

"Not an option."

"So we'll have to improvise. I assume you'll be the one delivering it, unless you've changed your mind about letting me leave."

"Nice try. The only thing up for discussion right now is what you mean by 'improvise.'"

Ren grinned and gave Akechi a gentlemanly gesture to exit the room ahead of him. "Join me outside and I'll show you. The light sucks in here."

Swinging back down to the elevator was not significantly less unpleasant than swinging up from it had been, especially when the floating platforms shivered ominously under their weight. Descending the hundreds of steps in the main hall proved even more wearisome with nothing to break it up. When Akechi sneaked a look at his phone, the time was already half past eight. To his credit, he neither screamed nor kicked Ren down the rest of the stairs.

Maybe Morgause had called in sick for him again. Unlikely, given she didn't have access to his phone. Maybe she could at least think of a medical issue serious enough to prevent him from calling in while also being neither serious enough for emergency services nor interesting enough for tabloid fodder.

Maybe he would be able to think again, once he stopped feeling like a lighter being sparked over and over without any fuel.

The light Ren wanted came from the Palace's sun, diminished into tolerability by the shade at the pyramid's entrance. Between the cover and cool air escaping the pyramid through the open doors, Akechi didn't feel an immediate need to do more than take his mask off.

Ren, of course, had his coat off before he was even fully outside. "Feel free to go inside if you get hot," he said, magnanimously, as he sat down. His mask and the rolled-up map landed on the stone in front of him. "Keep that outfit on, though."

Akechi nearly changed it out of pure pique. "Why should I?"

"For the improvising." Ren unrolled the map, flipped it over, and folded it back and forth around a rectangle of unmarked space. "Cut this for me?"

"I'm not a goddamn multitool," Akechi muttered, but he used the tip of the blade on his forefinger to slice along the creases. "This is an absurd idea, even by your standards. Nothing you can do to that material will result in a convincing calling card."

With a shrug, Ren turned his attention to a section of the map covered in hieroglyphs. "If you turn this sideways," he said, rotating the map with his fingers surrounding and blocking off parts of one character, "it looks like 'sa,' right?"

Akechi pinched his forehead carefully to avoid nicking himself. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"It's not like I have any magazines to cut up." After a thoughtful pause, Ren added, "I've got silk yarn."

"Whatever you do, just keep the message succinct. I'm not cutting out any approximation of 'We will take your distorted desires without fail.'"

"I wanted something wordy, I'd let you write it."

They ended up with a mixture of clumsily improvised sewing and mutilated hieroglyphs spelling out in katakana, "Futaba Sakura, be prepared. We're stealing your distorted guilt. From, the Phantom Thieves." For the opposite side of the makeshift card, Akechi trimmed the red disc at the top of the map into something like the rough shape of a top hat, and Ren added silk strands streaming up and out from beneath it. Plant balm seemed like a poor substitute for paste, but it held like cement, probably because of Ren's sheer crafting willpower.

"Not too shabby," Ren said, unconvincingly. "I think it'd work even better if the person Futaba reached out to directly gave it to her."

"What a pity that isn't an option." The heat was getting to Akechi, even with the chilled air of the pyramid at his back, and the only thing left for him to rake his claws through was off-limits for a little while longer. He looked away from the unbroken skin of Ren's bare shoulders as he switched to Robin Hood's mask and shucked his gloves and jacket.

Ren watched, one eyebrow cocked. "We also agreed you wouldn't ditch me."

"We're both reasonable people. Surely you don't intend to bicker over whether my briefly leaving the Palace constitutes 'ditching' you."

Ren's cough didn't quite cover his laugh. "Reasonable people, that's us."

Akechi gave him a flatly impressed look and said, "I'd like to get this change of heart over with before I miss all of my classes today."

With a noncommittal hum, Ren stretched out his arms. "What're you really in such a hurry for?"

"A better question is why you're not in more of a hurry than I am. I would have expected a greater sense of urgency from someone in your delicate legal circumstances." Akechi drew out the last three words like hot syrup being pulled out into amezaiku. "Or have you finally accepted that you won't be the one winning our duel, so you don't have a future to worry about?"

"Never." Ren got to his feet and dusted himself off. "Point taken, though. I hope Boss hasn't called the cops yet."

"So we're agreed, then?"

"Yeah, as long as you just give Futaba the calling card and come right back." Ren waited for sustained eye contact and a nod before turning to face first the distant suggestion of the deserted town on the horizon, then the hearse parked at the foot of the stairs. "How long did it take to drive here?"

Right. The exit was all the way back in that town, maybe an hour's journey if geometry was more consistent outside the pyramid than deep inside it. The Ruler's power seemed to be concentrated in the tomb, but there was no guarantee that the desert wasn't also transforming into a non-Euclidean nightmare.

"Too long," Akechi replied. "I don't suppose you can craft some sort of funny little warp bomb?"

"I can make you a Goho-M, but that's a one-way ticket. You'd need to get back to the pyramid on your own after you re-enter the Palace."

Context suggested that "Goho-M" was a stupid joke of a name for something like Morgause's Traesto skill. "Re-entering the Palace closer to Sakura's house should take care of that."

Ren returned his gaze and full attention to Akechi. "Isn't there only one entrance to a Palace?"

"Not necessarily, as long as the Palace is large enough." Kaneshiro's Palace had covered all of Shibuya, and Akechi had crossed over to a different distorted street each time he entered it. Not that it mattered much when the core of the distortion was in the sky.

"Huh," Ren said, followed by the silence of someone realizing he didn't have to enter Palaces at whatever exposed public location he first discovered them. He shook his head before continuing, "But with the way Futaba's mind is, you might always end up in that town."

Such a thing wouldn't have been unprecedented. Trying to enter Shido's Palace from inside the Diet Building had warped Akechi to the spot that corresponded to the area just outside the main gate, the only difference being how much his stomach twisted as his body was yanked through the Metaverse. Exiting returned him just as nauseatingly to the restroom stall he had entered from, which at least was convenient when he puked. Morgause would have mocked him if she had been allowed inside the building.

Spite made Akechi hope that a mentally ill fifteen-year-old girl really was running cognitive circles around Shido and his team of researchers, no matter how much it might personally inconvenience him. "That's possible, yes. Does this Goho-M of yours transport you along with any objects you're holding?"

Ren snorted. "Planning to pick up the car?"

"That shouldn't be necessary. Have you ever used one of those items while driving around Mementos inside your cat?"

"That's different, though. Mona's a person."

"I suppose we'll just have to experiment, then, won't we? If I vanish and leave the car behind, it will be your job to drive across the desert and pick me up."

Ren looked thoughtful for a moment before sitting back down and rifling through his coat pockets. "That'll work. Give me a sec."

As he waited, Akechi resisted the impulse to keep checking his phone, now that he was aware that Ren was keeping track of it, but let his foot tap restlessly. "What's the quickest route from the bathhouse to Sakura's house?"

"Take a left, turn right on the main street, keep going past the apartment building with all the cats, then take a right. It's the last house on your left before you reach the next street."

Akechi assumed Ren wasn't stupid enough to describe the apartment building in that way if there was more than one to walk past. "Simple enough. Is her guardian likely to be home?"

"Nah, Leblanc's open by now. You got a plan for getting Futaba to let you in?"

"I'll have to improvise." Akechi glanced over to catch, satisfied, the lopsided quirk of Ren's mouth.

A minute or so passed in silence before Ren stood and said, "Here," holding out what looked like a stick figure made of looped and twisted silk thread, inexplicably glistening. "You put your thumb through the head, then you pull this leg with your other hand until this little guy's just a line. Then boom, you're back at the entrance."

A parody of sacrifice, inspiring enough revulsion with its cartoonishness or cruelty or both to expel its perpetrator from the depths of someone else's distortion. Akechi felt his nose wrinkle as Ren dropped the thing into his bare palm. "Why is it covered in oil?"

"Great question. It doesn't work unless you rub a whole jar of plant balm on it."

"The unfathomable mysteries of cognition," Akechi said dryly. "And the car keys?"

After an unnecessary pause, Ren dug them out of his coat and tossed them over. "Good luck."

"I don't need luck to succeed."

Ren leaned back against a ledge at the edge of the pyramid's shade, never taking his eyes off Akechi. Akechi kept his own gaze low, avoiding both Ren and the locked shrine in the back of the hearse, as he made his way down the long staircase to the driver's side door. He needed to focus.

First things first: he tossed the keys through the open window into the passenger seat, to come with him if the car did and to stay behind if it didn't. Now he just needed to figure out the best way to entangle himself with the car to convince the Palace that it was as attached to him as his clothing.

A fastened seat belt would probably help. Hooking a limb through the steering wheel had even greater potential, but it would also look ridiculous, and Ren would be watching intently from above. Which shouldn't have mattered. Which didn't matter, he corrected himself.

Regardless, Akechi didn't want his phone poking into his ass no matter how he ended up contorting himself, so he withdrew it from his back pocket and considered his storage options. Unable to restrain himself, he tapped the screen and grimaced when the clock informed him that it was nearly a quarter past nine.

One moment he was doing quick calculations in his head; the next, his vision was blocked as something scratched his hand and startled his grip loose enough to seize his phone. Sputtering, he grasped blindly at a target no longer in reach. The Goho-M slipped through his fingers like a sliver of soap.

There was no sign of his attacker. No footsteps, no shadows, nothing but what Akechi recognized with dawning horror as white feathers scattered over his feet. He ignored whatever Ren was shouting in the background in favor of sprinting away, bellowing, "Morgause! Get back here!"

How the fuck had she found him here? Why the fuck would she steal his phone? Where the fuck—

A hideous shriek heralded her return right above his head. His hands closed around the empty air where her legs had been a split-second before, and she spiraled up out of reach into the unnatural blue of the sky. Akechi stood his ground, stance wide and arms raised, and yelled, "Give that back right now!"

"I'll give it to you, all right!" With an even louder shriek, Morgause plummeted toward him like a spiked volleyball.

He didn't flinch. A perfectly timed strike snapped his left hand around her leg, though at a bad angle that let her talons slash his wrist. Before he could strike with his right hand, Akechi felt the gut-punch of being dragged across the threshold of reality.

He clamped his mouth shut against an accelerating litany of nos. His costume evaporated from his skin and was replaced by nothing but a towel around his waist. Pavement warmed the soles of his feet. The stinging pain in his wrist vanished.

Even before his vision had fully adjusted, he could see enough to confirm that he was tucked into the narrow gap between a house and a stone privacy wall, and he dropped into a crouch in the desperate hope that no one had noticed the top of his head.

Just out of easy lunging range, Morgause stood on top of his phone with her crest raised and her feathers puffed. Her beak was parted slightly, to complement the glare she was directing at Akechi's twitching fingers. The Meta-Nav app filled the screen.

"Morgause," he hissed, as loudly as he dared, "what the fuck are you doing?"

"That's my line, kid." She leaned forward, pulling her wings in tight against her body. "You didn't come home last night. Didn't even leave a goddamn note. Do you have any idea how many places I've gone looking for you in this miserable pit of a city? Of course you don't, because you've been running around in the Metaverse. Without me. Or your clothes. Wanna explain that?"

I didn't ask you to look for me would have done the opposite of de-escalating. As calmly as he could, Akechi said, "It's a long story. One that I don't have time to relate in detail right now, so if you'd kindly return my phone—"

Morgause squawked so loudly his hands flew to his ears. "Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Remember that conversation we had two days ago? About staying focused and not getting yourself all twisted up?" She waited for him to open his mouth before adding, "Actually, it was three days ago, since you've been out all night like someone who didn't listen to a single goddamn word of it."

Surely it wouldn't take long for someone in this otherwise quiet neighborhood to investigate all the shrieking. It was also safe to assume that Akechi was hiding behind the wall around Sakura's house, and any chance of salvaging the situation would evaporate if the owner turned out to be home.

"I am focused," he said firmly. "Something came up. I'm handling it. Give me my phone.'

Morgause flicked her head to the side to glare at him with the full force of one black eye. "Handling him, you mean? Yeah, I bet something came up."

Cursing the heat in his cheeks that he could feel giving him away, Akechi made a reckless grab for the phone and got a bite to the back of his hand for it. He jerked back with a hiss. The mark was angry and red and would probably bruise, but she hadn't drawn blood. Yet.

The screen animated under Morgause's feet as a backlog of notifications rolled in. "You know the worst part?" she said. "I really thought you were smarter than this."

"It's not what you think."

"Oh, so it isn't you making the worst choices imaginable? It isn't you lying to me because you didn't want me to call your dumb ass out? Dammit, kid, you're self-destructing!"

Screaming back would only make things worse. Akechi counted to five twice because getting all the way to ten was impossible, then whispered, "We can have this fight later. My deadline is in less than three hours—"

Morgause shrieked again. "A job came in with a deadline and you didn't even tell me?"

Akechi gritted his teeth. "I don't have time for this."

"But you had time to waste with the leader of the Phantom Thieves?"

"Give me my fucking phone back and he'll be dead before lunch."

She puffed up to what had to be the absolute limit of her feathers, beak open and crest raised high as she wrapped one set of talons around her phone. "Fat chance. We're going to Mementos and you're going to explain yourself."

Realizations cascaded in Akechi's brain: that she had both located the Palace and figured out its keywords on her own, that she had stolen his phone to create a navigation point she could drag him through, that she was capable of operating the Meta-Nav with her horrible feet, and that there was no chance of winning this argument with her when she was running on pure, self-righteous, harried fury.

Winning the argument wasn't the only way to end it in his favor.

The moment Morgause lifted her foot to tap the screen, Akechi's right hand shot out for his phone. He didn't reach it—didn't even come close, intercepted by a bite on the wrist and a long slash on the forearm—but his gambit worked. All her sharp parts swarmed the sacrifice and missed the real threat darting in from the left to grab her neck.

It was a myth that you could bite through a finger as easily as through a carrot if human psychology didn't stop you. The brain had no bearing on whether the jaw could generate enough force to crack human bones. But it was in the jaw that the myth rang true, between the teeth that gnashed and the blood that drowned all fear.

The brain had no bearing on the fragility of bird bones, either, nor any tether strong enough to stay Akechi's hand.

A twist. A snap. The grinding of dislocated vertebrae. His brain couldn't stop him even after it was already enough, even after his right hand joined in to make the keel crack and the tiny ribs splinter, driving into the soft places they were meant to protect. All his brain could do was annoy him by making him tremble.

Morgause's little corpse was still and silent in his hands, just as it had been any number of times before. It had been so long since he last killed her. She was going to be incandescently angry.

Which was a tomorrow problem if ever there was one, but today Akechi hated that her lifeless eyes were open, and he hated even more that he was bothered by them. He hated that the blood on his hands was his own, that his jaw was still clenched and his pulse was still wild.

Enough. He needed to do what needed to be done: dispose of the body and deliver the—

Where the fuck was the calling card?

With a jolt Akechi dropped Morgause's corpse and shook out his towel around him. His pulse hammered dizzyingly in his ears, even after he glimpsed the card on the ground beside him. He wiped the blood off his hands before picking it up along with his phone. Blood was already welling up again on his right wrist.

He wanted to huddle with his head on his knees until he stopped feeling sick. He needed to focus.

Still breathing hard, he picked at the coils of the band keeping his locker key connected to his wrist. No damage beyond a spattering of blood and a nick from a talon. Retrieving his clothes and briefcase would require making his way into the bathhouse and coming up with a good explanation for the attendant for much more than just the nick, though, all while avoiding being caught on camera. "Detective Prince Ditches Class to Expose Self in Residential Neighborhood" was not a tabloid headline that his career could survive.

Even if he was able to spin things by claiming that he was targeted by the culprit behind the rampage incidents, Shido had made it clear that Akechi was one public fuck-up away from being yanked out of the spotlight. What did Shido care if Akechi was drummed out of the entertainment industry and kicked out of his expensive school? If anything, Shido would prefer having an assassin who didn't have to schedule his hits around classes and interviews. No wonder Shido wanted to replace him.

Focus.

Aside from the locker key, Akechi had a calling card, a phone, a towel, and a dead cockatoo. He knew what he needed to do: hide the corpse, deliver the calling card, change Sakura's heart, kill her Shadow, kill Ren, and report the hit to Shido. Everything else had to wait. Everything would be clearer when Ren was dead.

There was nowhere to hide anything in this narrow little space. Fighting the urge to recoil, he picked up Morgause's corpse without looking at it and slung it as hard as he could toward the neighbor's roof. It didn't come falling back down, which was all that mattered. Out of sight, out of mind.

Akechi bit his tongue to stop the unhinged laugh rippling up his throat. Focus.

Just how much of a shut-in was Sakura? It would be simplest to slip the calling card under the front door, knock, and flee, but if she was the type who never even left her room, he would be leaving the card for her guardian to find. There was no guarantee the card would ever be passed on to her, let alone before the deadline passed. He needed to put it directly in her hand.

There was a window a little farther down the wall. Large enough to climb in through if Akechi could get it open, but if he was going to break into a house wearing nothing but a suspiciously stained towel, he might as well at least go through the front door. If Ren could pick locks, surely Akechi could figure out how.

He quashed that line of thought immediately. "Detective Prince Ditches Class to Attempt Naked Home Invasion" was an even less survivable headline.

Consideration of an objectively insane plan to lure Sakura out by playing video game music on his phone was cut short when he noticed that the shoji screen covering the window had been slid a few centimeters open on the left.

After peeking over the privacy fence to make sure that no one was approaching from the alley, Akechi squatted until the sill of the window was above his shoulders, then sidled over like a crab. He caught a glimpse of a wide eye behind two layers of glass before the screen slid shut.

He had to be patient, he reminded himself. He kept his phone screen-down in his hand to avoid the temptation to glance at it when notifications flashed. Breathing as slowly as he could, he rapped gently, rhythmically at the window pane. An inversion of the vibration pattern he had assigned to Shido's calls. An invitation.

As he reached the end of a repetition, a knock from inside answered him. He stayed his hand and was rewarded by the screen sliding slowly back open, exposing the curve of what looked like shiny, flesh-colored plastic. He ceased being rewarded when the screen slid a few centimeters more and revealed a massive, creepy doll's head.

The thin shoulders beneath it and the mesh circles in its huge black eyes indicated that there was a person's head inside, staring out through the window pane. Akechi couldn't afford to let his nerves get the better of him.

Accepting the stare like a spotlight, he plastered a smile over his face and held up the makeshift calling card. The glass didn't look soundproof, so he said in a low voice, "Futaba Sakura, I presume? My apologies for bothering you at home. I was asked to deliver this."

It couldn't have been easy to see through that fine mesh, particularly if the goal was to make visual sense of Ren's disaster of a calling card. Seconds ticked by as Akechi kept his smile strong, hoping its gravity would forestall any efforts to look below his neck.

Arms attached to the thin shoulders gripped the mask shakily and pulled it up and off. Beneath was the now-familiar face of a girl with ghost-pale skin and owlish eyes behind even more owlish glasses, this time wearing oversized headphones instead of a royal diadem. Her mouth was set in a thin, trembling line; her nostrils flared with quick, shallow breaths.

It was only natural that Sakura looked familiar, like a dull-eyed echo of her Shadow. There was nothing unnaturally familiar about the shape of her nose or the angles of her eyelids.

She continued to stare at the card for an uncomfortably long time before sliding the window pane open, scarcely wide enough to admit an arm. As Akechi struggled to keep his impatience out of his expression, she raised a hand even more slowly, hesitating where the glass had been.

"Don't worry, I don't bite." Akechi smiled with his teeth sealed behind his lips.

Sakura's eyes narrowed. With the speed and precision of a viper, she snatched his phone and jerked backward. It was locked, of course, but she clutched it close to her face and tapped her fingers against the screen with a worrisome sense of purpose.

Akechi stuffed his rising panic under a bemused but unbothered façade: "I was referring to this card, actually. Would you kindly return my phone?"

Without even a flicker of acknowledgement, she continued tapping and swiping.

"I must insist that you return my phone at once," Akechi said, voice tighter than intended. "The passcode you're trying to guess is protecting confidential government information."

Sakura made a dismissive noise through her nose. Many agonizing seconds later, she tossed the phone back through the window into his waiting hand. She made no move to take the card.

Moving carefully, expression stiffened against the rage boiling beneath it, Akechi balanced the card on the track of the window. He started to back up before thinking better of it and sidling out of sight.

The card lay delicately in place for fewer agonizing seconds before being drawn inside, just before the window slammed shut and the screen slid back in place.

"Thank you," Akechi said, in case she was still listening. "I'll be going now."

He was creeping away around the corner when his phone buzzed.

| ||Saturday, Jul 239:3830% 🔋
Unknown
Unknown:

Explain yourself

Detective Prince Goro Akechi

Akechi:I'm sorry, who is this?

Unknown:

Don't play dumb

Why did the #1 phantom thieves hater just show up naked with the crappiest knockoff calling card ever

If you're having a celebrity meltdown leave me out of it

Akechi:I'm not having any sort of meltdown, I assure you.

And surely I don't deserve the title of "#1 Phantom Thieves Hater" when a notorious gang of hackers is holding the nation hostage just to take them down. My disagreements with their methods are principled, not personal.

Unknown:

Blah blah blah

Answer the question

Akechi:As I said, I was asked to deliver it. I'm not in a position to disclose the source of the request, but I assure you that I would have refused if I had any suspicion of malicious intent.

Unknown:

You're only getting more sus

Any reply would have come across as even more suspicious, so Akechi took a deep breath, pretended to be at peace with not having the last word, and tucked his phone into the waistband of the towel. Clearly she was some sort of technical prodigy, judging by how she had somehow acquired his chat ID from his locked phone, so antagonizing her seemed unwise. He needed to focus on finding a safe spot to reenter the Metaverse.

His phone vibrated again. When he didn't immediately check it, more vibrations followed in the pattern of an incoming call. Specifically, the pattern assigned to Shido. Akechi hastily pulled his phone back out only to find no sign of an active or missed call, only a fresh barrage of anonymous messages.

| ||Saturday, Jul 239:4129% 🔋
Unknown
Unknown:

What's up with the weird nav app on your phone

Full offense but you seem like a guy who gets everything from the app store

And this looks like some dark web shit

Hey

Don't think you can just ignore me

You're better off fessing up than making me find out on my own

Trust me

I have my ways and you won't like them

Akechi:Whatever you're threatening, I hope you're aware that it's likely in violation of multiple cybersecurity laws. I'm willing to overlook all of this if you cease contact immediately.

Unknown:

Lmao you really think you'll win at blackmail chicken

Check your lock screen dweeb

Against his better judgment, Akechi did, and discovered the background had been set to an extremely unflattering up-angle photo showcasing both his nostrils and nipples. It reappeared within two seconds of his changing it. On the bright side, if Sakura kept this up, his hand would be steadier when the time came to kill her Shadow.

Everything would be fine once he killed her Shadow. Everything would stop falling apart. It wouldn't matter how much still didn't make sense. What kind of threat could she pose to Shido when she couldn't even leave her house? Why would Shido need her dead if she didn't pose a threat?

But the hits didn't always make sense, did they? There had been one just back in May that had no apparent connection to politics or business but had obviously been of personal importance to Shido. The Shadow of a young man who hadn't even known enough to be afraid, who had looked barely older than Akechi himself, who Akechi had casually assumed was a DNA test away from blowing up someone's political career—

How had Shido found out about cognitive psience in the first place?

Akechi turned on his front-facing camera and stared into it, wrinkling and flaring his nose, narrowing and widening his eyes.

Another batch of messages made his phone shiver in his hand.

| ||Saturday, Jul 239:4329% 🔋
Unknown
Unknown:

Hey

Stop acting like paparazzi bait and answer me

Why is my name in that app's history

Don't tell me you're secretly a phantom thief

Because if you are you suck at it

He couldn't spiral about this. Not here, where anyone could stumble across him, and not now, when he had no time left to hesitate. Gravity was shifting; the ground was crumbling; nothing mattered but outrunning the collapse.

How far away did he have to be to avoid dragging Sakura into her own Palace with him? Were the walls of her house enough of a barrier? Morgause might have known, but Morgause was busy spending the next twenty-four hours reincarnating herself.

Akechi darted to the end of the house opposite the window and ignored more incoming messages as he activated the Meta-Nav.

During their second-ever meeting, Shido had offered Akechi a glass of scotch, and then, with a derisive laugh, a glass of water. It would have been rude to decline the latter. It would have been equally rude not to take at least a few sips, which Akechi had needed anyway to fend off a cough. It would have been unthinkable to take the glass with him when he left.

Even if Shido hadn't taken that opportunity, just two weeks ago Akechi had been made to leave his DNA on another glass. How long did it take to get results from a paternity test?

Had he ever given Shido a reason to suspect his identity? Had Shido ever needed a reason to suspect anything? Surely if Shido knew—if Shido even suspected—he wouldn't have made Akechi a lynchpin of his plans. Surely he wouldn't still be pulling Akechi's strings if he knew that Akechi had tied them on at both ends.

Stupid, useless thoughts that Akechi shouldn't have been allowing to gnaw at his brain, but the dizziness of re-entering the Palace hit him like a hammer to the back of his skull. Focusing hurt. Opening his eyes hurt. Entering the Metaverse twice on a good day was exhausting, and at this point, he couldn't even remember what a good day felt like.

Searing light. Oppressive heat. Sharp pricks of pain from his own claws digging into his arms. Akechi took a deep breath that sucked grains of sand in his mouth before coughing his way to clarity.

His eyes finally adjusted as a Ren-shaped shadow blocked the sun and said, "What the hell happened to you?"

"I made the delivery." There was too much of a croak in Akechi's voice. He coughed before adding, "Did it work?"

"See for yourself."

Switching outfits would have helped with the heat, but trying to pull Robin Hood to the forefront felt like grasping at water. Akechi settled for pushing his mask up, draining the excess red from the world, as he twisted around to take in the view of whatever Ren was pointing at behind him.

The nearby pyramid rose as tall and imposing as ever, but its stone blocks were flickering out of sync with each other like an array of misconfigured screens. Where the pyramid's tip had been was only a mess of rubble, as if something had erupted through it. Akechi craned his neck back and beheld the underside of a massive feline form circling like a vulture on enormous white wings.

"The good news I don't think it can see us," Ren said, just before the creature's flight path revealed a glitching cube of green light where its head should have been. "The bad news is it swoops every time I get close to the pyramid."

Akechi grimaced. "Do you typically have to contend with giant monsters when you steal a Palace's Treasure?"

"Yeah, actually. We're three-for-three on transforming Palace Rulers." Ren squinted into the sky, lower lip between his teeth. "So I guess that's Futaba's Shadow up there."

A distorted roar shook the world from the ground up. Flecks of the sky winked out like dead pixels.

Waiting around wasn't going to improve the situation, and Akechi could no longer endure being on the ground while Ren loomed over him. He gathered himself, balanced his weight carefully, and managed to stand without shaking.

Ren still frowned and put an unwelcome hand on his shoulder, which Akechi didn't manage to dislodge until after a healing skill permeated his skin. The quick tingle of energy put extra force behind Akechi's snarl of, "Stop it. Save your damn strength for knocking that thing out of the sky."

Rolling his eyes, Ren replied, "You got any skills with a hundred-meter range? I sure don't."

"You said yourself that it swoops. We just have to lure it down to our level."

"So it can flatten us?" Ren used his hands to pantomime an unnecessary demonstration. "We've got two options here. One is you keep it distracted while I go after the Treasure."

At least he wasn't distracting himself with questions about Akechi's abrupt exit from the Palace. Even from a distance, he must have been able to see Morgause, and he certainly must have heard all the yelling. Demonstrably, he was clever enough not to have mistaken what happened for a sign he needed to pick Akechi up in the town.

Focused. Down to business. Akechi responded in kind by taking a quick stock of how much energy he still expend before passing out. Megidolaon wasn't an option. If the beast shrugged off curse damage, he could fuel at most one swing of Loki's sword or a single burst of supernatural gunfire.

"And the other?" he asked.

"Option Two is we wait for the Palace to finish collapsing on its own."

Akechi scoffed just before the ground beneath him vibrated with another roar, and what looked like an obsidian cube hit the sand with a heavy thud. When he glanced up, one of the dead-pixel areas in the sky had been replaced by a blinding white glow, bleeding over the blue around it as if were a flashlight beam shining through a small hole.

"We can't be certain the Palace is collapsing on its own," Akechi decided aloud. "It's just as likely transforming into something even less hospitable. How quickly can you retrieve the Treasure?"

Ren's eyes glowed briefly red, as if he intended to size up Akechi's strength as he would a Shadow's. "You wouldn't have to hold out that long. As soon as I grab the Treasure, that monster will turn back into Futaba. Probably."

"'Probably'? Do you actually know how any of this works?"

"Hey, I'm not the one who made the Palace weird." Ren whipped around with a start as flickering stone-screens tumbled down one side of the pyramids like sloughed skin. When he turned back to Akechi, he added, "Speaking of knowing how this works, you know your 'you'll never see the real world again, mwahaha' threats have been bullshit, right? There's not gonna be any time for a duel before the Palace collapses. Like it or not, you're getting me out of here."

Of course Akechi knew that. Palaces began to collapse immediately after their Rulers were killed, too, and if Ren considered being briefly yanked out of the Metaverse before being thrown back into another sector of it as "getting out," that was his own delusion. What came out of Akechi's mouth was, "What the hell was that cartoon villain laugh? I don't sound anything like that."

"I dunno if I can get my voice high enough to do your evil cackle." Ren took a deep breath with menacing intent, only to let it out as an oof when Akechi landed a punch to his solar plexus. He doubled over, wheeze-laughing.

There was nothing focused or business-like or even sane about this. Time was ticking away; the sky was literally falling; what little energy they had left already needed to be stretched farther than it could possibly go. None of that stopped Ren from tackling Akechi's legs, or Akechi from grabbing a handful of Ren's stupid unkempt hair, or both of them from kicking and rolling in the shifting sand.

The hideously high-pitched sound of another piece of the pyramid scraping its way down the slope sounded enough like Morgause's shrieks to snap Akechi out of it. "Get off me," he snapped, shoving Ren with a level of force that couldn't be mistaken for playful. "We're doing Option One. Get in there."

Ren got to his feet, breathing hard. Instead of doing what he was told for once, he pointed past Akechi at the pyramid and said, "Change of plans."

Akechi turned to find a pale figure sticking out against the shaded entrance to the pyramid, its shape unmistakable. The flying beast continued circling overhead as a separate, indifferent entity as Futaba's Shadow took a tentative step forward into the sunlight.

The ground shook with so much force that Akechi dropped into a crouch to ride it out. As it subsided, the Ruler turned back toward the entrance, extended an arm draped in linen, and vanished.

In the stillness that followed, what looked impossibly like the real Sakura shuffled out of the gloom, barefoot and bedraggled, dark eyes saucer-wide. The flying beast landed on the wreckage of the top of the pyramid, cracking screen-blocks with its enormous paws. Sakura leapt at the noise and wrapped her arms around herself.

"Futaba?" Ren called, snaring her attention. "How did you get here?"

She squeaked, then took a deep breath and set her shoulders. Without looking up from her careful watch on her own feet, she began to descend the steps. "I copied an app to my phone. It had my name in the search history. And Sojiro's house. A-and the word 'tomb.' It made me think about my mom—about my mom's—"

Another quake ripped through the earth without further damaging the pyramid or shaking loose any more pieces of the sky. Sakura dropped into a huddle on the steps, knees drawn to her chest. When she didn't stand up again after the shaking ended, Ren ascended the stairs toward her.

A growl radiated from the beast as it arched its back. Ren took one step back down, and the beast relaxed again.

The precise psychological intricacies of whatever was going on in Sakura's heart didn't matter. Akechi needed only to figure out where Sakura's Shadow had ended up in this little shell game, and then he could put all of this behind him. He followed Ren up as far as the beast was willing to permit, trying to ignore the way the rotating cube of its head seemed to be watching him.

He needed to stay close, crowded against Ren despite the generous width of the stairs. When the chains shifted around Sakura's heart, he needed to be ready to stab between them.

If worse came to worst, what would happen if the flesh-and-blood Sakura died inside her own Palace? There was already real blood on Akechi's hands, a drying trail of it seeping from the slashes on his right forearm. He couldn't think about that right now.

Halfway up the steps, ten below Sakura, Ren asked gently, "What about your mom?"

"H-her research. Am I really inside my own heart? Is this real?" Sakura took a shuddering breath before lifting her head from the tops of her knees. Her gaze slid past Ren to land on Akechi, and her eyes narrowed sharply. "Why are you here?"

Akechi dropped his mask back into place, as if that would make a difference now. "I'm simply assisting him in changing your heart, as you requested. Don't let my presence distract you."

She let out a harsh snort. "Of course I'm gonna be distracted by the D-list celebrity who was just creeping around the house."

"You're in a rather perilous position right now," Akechi said with as little vitriol as he could. "Do you want your heart changed, or do you want to fuck around until you're crushed by your own mental instability?"

"He's got a point," Ren cut in, as Sakura's hands balled into fists, "even though he's being a dick about it. Just ignore him."

She shook her head, whipping her loose hair around her arms. "I can't. The other me can't either. She—" Sakura's eyes rolled back into her head before her eyelids squeezed shut. When they opened again, they glowed faintly for a split-second, and for the first time directly met Akechi's. "Who killed my mom?"

Cascading grinding and shattering sounds gave Akechi an excuse to break her intense eye contact. The beast atop the pyramid was shifting its weight, sending pressure cracks branching down the screens all the way to the pyramid's base. If whatever the treasure was remained inside, it likely wouldn't be accessible for much longer.

"If he knows, he can tell you later," Ren said quickly. "I don't think it's safe for you to be inside your own heart. Can you call off that—"

"No." Sakura all but lunged to her feet, advancing with such purpose that Akechi instinctively backed up several steps. Which was absurd. What could she possibly do to him? He planted his feet as she asked again, voice low and overlaid with an echo, "Who killed my mom?"

The beast roared. A fissure opened across the stairs just behind Sakura.

The warning tug on Akechi's tattered right sleeve had to be from Ren. Akechi stopped trying to contain a growl and shoved hard in the direction of the unwanted touch, taking bright, brief satisfaction in the sound of Ren tumbling off the steps to the sand below. A massive cube of dead sky landed in front of the entrance to the pyramid, blocking most of the doorway.

Fuck it, Akechi decided. Nothing for it now but to accelerate Option Two.

There was an almost giddy relief to unstoppering his throat and letting the poison that had been roiling in his stomach come spraying out: "I killed her. I invaded her mind just like I'm invading yours now, and I shot her Shadow right between the eyes while it begged me not to pull the trigger." Laughter shook its way out of him, wild and broken, leaving him trembling in its wake. "You built a labyrinth around the wrong monster. Now that the real one's here, what are you going to do about it?"

Sakura's eyes blazed like angry stars. Whatever words might have been hidden in the sound she made were lost under Akechi's own yelp as something lashed around his body, yanking him off the steps just before they cracked apart like a misshapen eggshell.

He landed on his back in sand with an oof. The line of the grappling hook—of course it was the fucking grappling hook—dragged and squeaked against the leather on his outfit as it was sucked back around Ren's wrist.

Ren himself didn't say anything, only stared at Akechi with an expression that seemed to be at war with itself. Surprise, disappointment, anger, but not enough of any of them. Concern, unthinkably. At least he wasn't asking whether all of it was true.

He was so very clever, after all. With a single glance, he had connected dots that Akechi spent years overlooking.

The sky was flickering, probably cycling through colors that Akechi's lenses were shielding him from. The roaring had stopped. When Akechi got to his feet, struggling against the sand that seemed to be rising around him, there was no sign of the beast. The pyramid continued collapsing on its own.

How long had the sun been gone? All its light now radiated from Sakura's eyes as she floated down from the steps with the uncanny grace of her Shadow. The echo was still entwined with her voice, growing louder by the word: "Why did I trust the men who said it was my fault? I knew the truth. All this time, deep down, I knew. I let my own fear deceive me."

She touched down the sand well out of Akechi's reach and made no move to advance further. "What the hell is this?" he hissed at Ren, one gauntlet raised to shield his eyes. "Has her heart changed yet?"

"No, I think she's—"

Sakura's booming voice drowned him out: "I won't let the truth stay buried any longer. I know who to blame now. I know who I'll never forgive!"

The shining figure of her Shadow rose out of her body toward the broken sky, growing brighter and brighter until it burst. When the supernova dazzle cleared, a flying saucer hovered above Sakura, bathing her in its light.

"Oh, fuck me." Stomach churning, Akechi rounded on Ren. "Is that a Persona?"

"I think so? I guess there's more than one way to change a heart."

So there was no killing her Shadow now without killing her physical form along with it.

What did it matter if Akechi had to spill her red blood instead of the black substance of her soul? It was murder all the same. What did it matter if that blood was half-tainted by the same source as his own? How many other half-siblings had he already killed? Ignorance didn't make his hands any cleaner.

It was much too late for any of that to matter.

Right now, she would surely be weak. Akechi had been shell-shocked and trembling in the aftermath of his own awakening, his strength yanked out of him in fits and starts to power Loki's defensive rampage. Robin Hood's voice in his head had been somehow more distressing than the scraps of Robin Hood's body everywhere, on his skin and the walls and the floor but mostly on Loki's striped carapace, where they stuck like wet bits of eggshell.

No. All that mattered now was that Sakura was vulnerable, and even with so many hours of exhaustion weighing down his bones, Akechi was stronger than she could even dream of becoming.

It also mattered that Sakura had vanished.

"She went up inside," Ren said helpfully, sliding a pointing finger into Akechi's view. "There were tentacles. Now's the time to get us out of here."

Akechi grabbed his wrist and bent it backward until he grunted and squirmed. "That's not up to you, Joker. I've just fulfilled my end of our deal. You have no say in what happens next."

Despite the strain in his voice, Ren sounded infuriatingly calm as he said, "Don't do something you'll regret. You can go home. Sleep on it."

"Don't you dare presume to know what I'll regret."

Chips of the sky raining clinking against his helmet reminded Akechi that he had more pressing concerns than an argument. After shoving Ren away with enough force to put him facedown in the sand, Akechi beckoned the UFO with one hand and gripped the edge of his mask in the other. He only had one Laevateinn left in him; he had to make it count.

"You want your revenge?" he yelled, as the UFO tipped its front down like a boar preparing to charge. "Come and take it!"

Lights flashed from the underside of the UFO before it shot forward, angled toward Akechi's chest. Good. It would be so much easier if she put up a fight, just like her mother did. He tore his mask away—

And Ren tackled him around the knees, knocking him flat on his face. His mask fell from his grasp. The UFO whizzed harmlessly over their heads.

Akechi's furious "Get off me!" overlapped with Futaba's booming, distorted "Stay out of my way!"

"No." It was remarkable how strongly Ren's baritone could carry even when he didn't raise his voice. He took advantage of the moment he had bought himself to say, "Futaba, you're not a killer."

"You don't know what I am!" The UFO shook violently in the air, scattering the debris collected on top of it. "You don't know what I want!"

"You want the truth. You can't get that out of him if he's—"

Akechi threw his head back into Ren's face. Snarling, he bucked his way to freedom and snatched his mask back up. A well-timed kick kept Ren's hand from closing around his ankle before he surged back to his feet. The sand crested as high as his knees, futilely.

"Akechi, you're not—" Ren coughed on what must have been a mouthful of swirling sand— "you're not really a killer, either."

Without turning from the UFO, Akechi spat out an incredulous laugh. "That's the stupidest shit that's ever come out of your mouth."

A light show flashed from the bottom of the UFO, at odds with Futaba's sharp, cold, "He killed my mom."

"Exactly." Cackling, Akechi spread his arms wide. "Come on, then! Let's see which of us can split the other in half!"

"No." The rage in Sakura's voice was simmering instead of seething, contained but still hot enough to boil the meat off bones. "He's right about one thing. I don't want to kill you. I want you to pay. I want you to rot in jail for the rest of your life and wake up every morning wishing my mom was alive to forgive you."

Akechi couldn't stop laughing, even as he doubled over dizzy, unable to catch his breath. "You fool, the only revenge you'll get on me is the revenge you take right now. This is all you'll ever get! If you want justice, then grow a fucking spine!" He forced air into his spasming lungs, coughed it out, and sucked down more. "Do what it fucking takes!"

The UFO hovered stubbornly in place. "Trust me, I'll make you sorry you ever born. And I'll do it on my terms, not yours!"

"Coward!" Summoning Loki blasted away Akechi's senses. His consciousness flickered. It didn't matter. He needed to do what he should have done a long time ago: shatter the chains on his own heart. It was long past time to rip away everything he had foolishly allowed to cling to him, and if he had to burn himself down in the process, so be it. Let him wake up alone with blood on his hands and a ragged hole in his memory.

But Loki was just a flickering mirage, and his hand was just a useless weight on his forehead. Blood trickled from the tips of his gauntlets into his eyes. He was unfocused. Weak. Pathetic.

Pressure on his upper arm made him howl and thrash. The world turned red again through the lenses of his mask. "Calm down," Ren said firmly, giving Akechi the burst of rage that he needed to throw a punch. His legs wobbled too badly for it to connect with anything.

No, he wasn't wobbling—the ground was heaving beneath him, cracking itself open. The sand churned like an angry sea as it drained into widening crevices. A massive cube of what was left of the sky crash-landed so near him that he felt wind on his face.

"Futaba's already gone. There's almost nothing left of the Palace." There was urgency in Ren's voice, finally, as he grabbed Akechi's shoulders. Another quake knocked them both off their feet. "Get us out of here now!"

Akechi snarled into Ren's face before pulling up the Nav and spitting into it, "Mementos."

The Face on the Back of the Moon - Stealth_Noodle (2024)
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